This is an interesting essay by Will Lloyd on the writer and early “transgender pioneer” Jan Morris.
It’s interesting to see how Morris went from a stereotypical “man” to an equally stereotypical “woman.”
It also points out that back in the 1970s, women who disagreed with gender self-identification were free to do so openly (look at those Rebecca West and Nora Ephron quotes):
The issue of BBC neutrality reaches Australia’s equivalent, the ABC. The ABC’s own program Media Watch discusses the issue with great clarity. I discovered Australia has its own ‘Stonewall champions’ program, or something very similar… and that ABC is very much in bed with it.
The commentary is generally quite good, pointing out that the organisation offers ‘diversity points’ or whatever for editorial choices made in favour of trans people; unfortunately it also contains a stumble by calling an organisation critical of this arrangement ‘anti-trans’; I saw no such animosity when I went looking.
A gyne/ob writes a letter in response to a Russ Douthat column, telling us that People denied an abortion suffer financially and health wise. I’m sure if I asked for an abortion I’d be denied, even here in Minnesota. But I’m not one of the generic people she’s referring to.
Holms beat me to the Media Watch item which was excellent and calmly presented.
Here is another very good panel discussion from our other National broadcaster, SBS, featuring some excellent contributions, including Sall Grover of Giggle (@sallwrites).
While the only women to be Prime Minister of the UK have been conservatives, the last two ascended to impossible situations, and were shot down rather quickly. I can’t help but think that members would be circling the wagons around Boris Johnson after similar bad judgment calls early in his term, or any other man. Truss is resigning before she even figured our her job.
I’m not defending Truss, I’m just observing that the Tories are not necessarily the Land of Opportunity for women in England disaffected by the Labour enthralldom into gender-slavery. May didn’t get much of a chance to do what Boris ended up pooching, a decent post-Brexit accord with Europe.
It’s interesting that so many trans activists seem to believe that women couldn’t possibly be interested in defending their own rights and interests when they attempt to retain or regain single sex services, facilities, and positions for exclusively female use. This supposed concern is just a smokescreen to disguise hatred of trans folk. Women who point out the harms to women and girls arising from implementing policies that allow trans identified males into spaces previously reserved for women and girls only, don’t really care about women or girls at all, they just want to attack trans people. So, according to this view, women must have no stake at all in things that would benefit them. As women. What an odd thing to say. This is particularly strange when such accusations of dishonesty and insincerity come from trans activists who are not themselves trans. Maybe this is a pre-emptive deflection designed to divert attention from their blatant misogyny, which is thinly veiled by an opportunistic concern for trans “rights.” What better way to get away with being abusive (and be rewarded for it!), all in the name of “the most marginalized and oppressed group ever.” Ever accusation is a confession, right?
“The NHS has published its new service specifications for kids with gender dysphoria. They state its primary purpose is psychosocial/psychological interventions. This is huge. Mermaids/Maugham/Webberley are furious. I can’t understand why more people aren’t talking about it.”
Sandra Boynton, in August, published a 45th anniversary edition of her first book, Hippos Go Berserk. She posted on Facebook today that she mostly updated the art work without changes, but she did add a few things. She showed one changed image from the book, a scene including a hippo with a scarf, and she noted that the Gryffindor scarf is new.
The first comment was complaining about the scarf, couldn’t she have called it something else, because the Harry Potter author has become so hateful.
I don’t know if Boynton has waded into the gender ideology issue, but I was thinking of getting a copy of the book anyway, and the Gryffindor scarf sold one today.
She’s working on a sequel, titled Hippos Remain Calm.
The brilliant Dr Em and someone I didn’t previously know called Bradders (on Twitter) were detained by police after the FILA conference in Cardiff after Bradders asked a man to leave a women’s toilet. The man complained to police that Bradders had threatened to punch him and that she’d been taking cocaine.
The police arrested Bradders and Dr Em went along with her to the police station. They tried to persuade Bradders to apologise (to whom and for what I don’t know) under the Restorative Justice scheme. They said they’d let her go if she did. Admirably, she refused on the grounds that she’d done nothing wrong. She told police that she had video of the encounter which proved her innocence.
They released her at 4am.
I’m not sure yet whether they’ve charged her with anything.
The punchline:
The complaint (by the man in the woman’s toilet) was recorded as being by a woman.
Update: I’ve spoken to Bradders. She wasn’t charged, thankfully. She’s trying to get the police to explain in writing why they arrested her and on the basis of what evidence.
Update on the Sandra Boynton situation. That picture has prompted over 900 comments, with many additional comments deleted. None of the other recent posts on her page have received nearly that many comments. Lots of people have expressed their “disappointment”, in varying degrees, that Boynton chose to mention that the scarf on one hippo is a Gryffindor scarf. In a reply to a comment, she wrote:
I steadfastly believe that every person should live their life the way they want to, and should be respected.
Which to me sounds perfectly consistent with:
Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security.
from Rowling.
I think Boynton was completely blindsided by the level of controversy. I doubt she’s looked at the issue at all, and she doesn’t indicate any interest in doing so. She just wanted to post a picture from her book, and it uses iconography from the extremely popular Harry Potter books. I’m pleased that she hasn’t thus far disavowed the use of the name “Gryffindor” to describe the scarf, even as myriad comments express glee that the colors match those of some other entity.
I was reading the memoir of retired FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood. This passage caught my attention:
Finally, ritualistic offenders sometimes act out using themselves as props or “co-stars”, if you will. Some years ago, Dr. Park Dietz, Prof. Ann Wobert Burgess of the University of Pennsylvania, and I researched and wrote the first textbook ever devoted to fatal autoeroticism. We found that such deaths were basically masochistic. That is, most of the 150 victims we studied were acting out masochistic fantasies at the times of their accidental deaths.
Yet masochism wasn’t the only feature we detected. A large percentage of the victims also were cross-dressed when they were discovered, a provocative finding that opened a new avenue of speculation. While I still believe the great majority of deaths due to dangerous autoeroticism are grounded in the victims’ masochistic fantasies, the males who cross-dress may not be fantasizing only masochistic plots. They may also be acting out sadistic fantasies using themselves as replacements for women who are unsatisfactory, unavailable, or unwilling. [p. 60]
[He then cites some specific examples, which I’ll spare the B&W readership.]
It should go without saying that I am not asserting that all, or even most cross-dressers are acting out their misogynistic fantasies. But some of them appear to be doing so. As we have so often noted on these pages, it’s clear that some trans-identified males are dangerous, which means that taken as a group, they’re all less than trustworthy.
Picture shared by Abortion Access Front (used to be Lady Parts Justice League):
Just a reminder… All gender identities get abortions! (And have since the dawn of time)
I beg to differ.
A reminder? No, a claim, and a false one at that.
All gender identities get abortions? No. Women get abortions. Women may or may not claim to have gender identities, these gender identities don’t’ get abortions, the women do. Men don’t get abortions. Men may also claim gender identities. The idea that the set of gender identities claimed by men (for example, “cis male”) is a subset of the set claimed by women strains credulity. So this fails in multiple ways.
Since the dawn of time? Not before the Earth existed. Not before humans existed. Not before language existed. Not before some people decided that how you feel inside was more important for classification than your actual sex. And that wasn’t until a small number of years ago. So, very far from “the dawn of time”.
Two years ago, at the age of twelve, she began delving into the rabbit hole of gender woo. I believe this was partly driven by her closest friend, a girl treated as a boy by his family and the school, and partly as a response to her being sexually assaulted two years earlier.
She had spiralled so low that she was making accusations of sexual assault against one of her mothers (not the birth one and later found to be lies), refused to go home, and ended up living with me and her grandmother for 6 months while we worked to reconcile her with her parents. We attended counselling with her where she said she was trans, didn’t think I would accept her for that, and I was given the gender fairy bread person. I gave the counsellor a reading list!
She returned home and not long after we moved a 2 hours drive away. She went from being a Harry Potter fan (devoured the books as an 8 year old) to hating JKR because of her anti trans views. She could not be dissuaded. She cut her hair short and wanted to be called Liam.
She stayed in contact with her grandmother but rarely spoke with me. I accepted it but was sure the phase would pass. I was happy to give her time and space to work it out.
Three weeks ago she stayed 4 nights during the school holidays. On the drive, she again raised the subject of pronouns, telling me there were hundreds of them, and that I should respect people’s pronouns. Driving at 120 km/hr isn’t the best time for a discussion, so just let it lie. She also told us she had decided to grow her hair long again. She was as talkative as she used to be, no longer the sullen teenager we had to face.
On the second day of the visit, she asked if I still had all the Harry Potter videos and if we could watch some. Strike me PINK! Something’s afoot here. We had a good visit, just like the old times and I was sad to take her home.
Last night she was on the phone with her grandmother and asked to speak to me. She was upset that she’d been dumped from a friendship circle at school, something that happens all too often with teen girls. I had always been the one she turned to for advice on these matters in the past. I made supportive noises and told her a joke.
Then, she told me of an old woman that she helped out when she was lost. She told me the old woman said she is pretty. I asked her how that made her feel “Good, really good”, she answered. And so did I.
“Never before have family relationships been seen as so interwoven with the search for personal growth, the pursuit of happiness, and the need to confront and overcome psychological obstacles,” the historian Stephanie Coontz, the director of education and research for the Council on Contemporary Families, told me in an email. “For most of history, family relationships were based on mutual obligations rather than on mutual understanding. Parents or children might reproach the other for failing to honor/acknowledge their duty, but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible.”
We have all seen countless lists outlining the various features of pseudoscience such as Bob Park’s “The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science”. Some of us have even written such lists ourselves. I thought it might be interesting to attempt something similar for Bogus Social Justice Movements (henceforth referred to as BSJMs). Examples of BSJMs include MRAs, incels, the dominant strand of trans rights activism, NAMBLA, the pro porn/pro “sex work” lobby etc*. Attempts to portray legitimate criticisms of Islamism as “Islamophobia” or portray legitimate criticisms of the Israeli occupation of Palestine as “antisemitism” can be understood in the same terms**. As with pseudoscience, there is no non-arbitrary place to “draw a line”, such that everything on one side is 100% legitimate social justice activism and everything on the other side is 100% bogus social justice activism. Rather than a sharp definition we must make do with a set of criteria. Most BSJMs will probably meet most of these criteria to some degree, but none has to meet all of them 100%. So, without further ado, I give you
The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Social Justice Movements
1. People vs. Ideas
• The goal of every legitimate social justice movement is to protect real live human beings from injustice and harm.
• BSJMs are usually more concerned with protecting ideas, behaviors, belief systems, ideologies, cultures, traditions, policies, or ways of life. Criticism of what people think, say, or do is re-interpreted as an attack on who they are.
2. Unstated Premises
• BSJMs make frequent appeals to non-specific “rights” that their opponents are accused of denying or violating. Even the most basic tenets of their cause are based on premises and definitions that are best left unspecified.
3. Dubious Connection to Harm
• Every legitimate social justice movement can provide endless examples of obvious, demonstrable injustice and harm.
• BSJMs make exaggerated claims of “harm”, as well as “oppression”, “hate”, “persecution”, “violence” etc. based on a Danish cartoon or the proper use of pronouns (!). The alleged “harm” only shows up at the other end of a long chain of impossibly sloppy inferences and extrapolations and stretching of word-meanings beyond the breaking point. Quite frequently the apocalyptic rhetoric boils down to the implicit threat that the alleged “victims” themselves will hurt themselves or others if they don’t get their way.
4. No Debate
• Every legitimate social justice movement is actively seeking to change hearts and minds through open debate. If anything, their opponents are the ones who are trying to shut down debate because their position is indefensible.
• BSJMs are more concerned with silencing dissent and forcing their views down people’s throats unexamined through intimidation and bullying. Anything other than blind, unconditional agreement in advance is spun as debating their “right to exist” (#2) etc.
5. Conflicts with Real Social Justice Movements
• No real social justice movement is attempting to make other oppressed or marginalized groups less safe from injustice or harm.
• What BSJMs call “oppression” usually boils down to other groups having rights on their own (the right to free speech, the right to leave the dominant religion, the right of lesbians to be uninterested in your “lady cock” etc.).
6. Appropriation/Forced Teaming
• BSJMs appropriate real social justice movements and claim monopoly on speaking in their name while being actively hostile to their goals (#5). Every right and protection gained by other marginalized groups is re-interpreted as belonging to the usurpers instead of the people for whom they were originally intended (and the people who did all the actual work fighting for them).
7. Institutional Capture
• Real social justice movement usually play with open cards.
• BSJMs are more inclined to work by stealth to capture institutions from the inside and change legislation with little or no meaningful debate or accountability (#4). One favorite strategy is sneaking weasel words into bills that were introduced to protect other groups (#6) and use them as a trojan horse for the BSJM’s own agenda.
* As I recently commented there was a time, not too long ago, when the same applied to smokers.
** This remains true even if we concede that bigotry and hate against Muslims and Jews is a real and very serious problem.
(Plagiarizing my Facebook page in reference to this article.) This is a very cool find in itself, and it provides evidence that Basque was being written before the Romans came to the area. But there are a couple of things about the article that bug me. First, the headline: this doesn’t shed any light on the “origins” of Basque (whatever that means); instead, it provides some evidence for what scholars of Basque already knew–that Basque was spoken in the region before the Romans came. The more interesting aspect is that this seems to show that Basque was written before the Romans came along. Before this discovery, the earliest direct evidence of Basque came from Roman transcriptions of Basque names (both place names and person names).
The other thing that bugs me is calling Basque “mysterious”. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about Basque. True, it’s a language isolate, meaning that it has no known linguistic relatives, but the most likely reason for that is that it’s the last remnant of the languages that were spoken in Europe before the Indo-Europeans moved in and established (or imposed) their languages on most of the continent. For whatever reason (probably because no one thought it was worth trying to conquer a bunch of sheep herders in the Pyrenees) Basque survived while the others died out. Not mysterious, just fortuitous.
Basque does have a lot of features that don’t exist in Indo-European languages, such as ergativity, but that’s not terribly uncommon in other world languages. There’s really no need to exoticize the language.
But anyway, read the article. It’s really cool. (And the one word they’ve deciphered so far is related to the modern word “zorionak”, which means roughly “congratulations” but is also used for “Happy Birthday”, “Happy New Year”, and so on.)
Civil servants are warned in an introduction to the glossary: “It is important to recognise these words and phrases, understand their context and educate those you hear using them about the reasons why their use can be deemed offensive or upsetting, as people may have unknowingly used a term without being familiar with its meaning.
“Whilst passing uses of these phrases might not be considered misconduct, the importance of challenging their use cannot be overstated.
“Doing so reduces hostility, intimidation and degradation within the workplace, and encourages all whom we work with such as colleagues and service users, to treat others with decency and respect.”
The glossary was shared from the official justice.gov.uk email address of the “HMPPS pride in prisons and probation LGBTI+ staff support network”, which has 5,764 members, under the watch of a diversity lead who is paid £37,166.
The movement is not about rights, it is about subjgation. Subjugation not only of women and LGB, but all of us who speak English, or want to discuss a serious topic.
Ministry officials declare that this not official policy and was not authorized to be released.
A Prison Service spokesman said: “This guidebook was published by a staff network, its content was not approved prior to being communicated and it is a network rather than a corporate HMPPS view.
“Following its publication, HMPPS is reviewing the rules around internal communications to staff from network groups.”
The prison population that identifies as transgender stood at 197 in England and Wales last year, a 21 per cent jump from 163 in 2019. These did not hold a gender recognition certificate, meaning their lived gender was not legally recognised, and the vast majority were men identifying as women.
This has sparked calls for women’s prisons to be open only to those born female to ensure safety, although the MoJ says trans prisoners are managed with a robust risk assessment.
I was reading a recent New York Times article about how gambling interests have infiltrated American college sports, now that sports betting is legal. It’s a fine article about an appalling situation, and I don’t wish to get into the weeds here about it, but there is one aspect I thought I’d mention.
The gambling interests have provided financial incentives to the schools to promote and publicize their particular gambling sites or apps. Much of the outside money that goes to colleges for major sports goes directly to the athletic department, for good reasons, and as required by NCAA “regulations”. These gambling financial incentives are mostly expected to go to athletic departments as well. But these gambling contracts were a clandestine maneuver, and many people involved in financial and athletic oversight are upset about them; some are calling for the funds to go somewhere other than the athletic departments.
College athletes are disproportionately from marginalized communities. Given that, one official suggested that the financial incentive money should go toward: promoting Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion. Huh. This was likely an off-the-cuff response, but it strikes me as the wrong thing to do. I don’t have a high opinion of such programs, either for their results or their aims. But why not suggest that the money goes toward education, the core mission of the school? Is this college now, a bunch of sports teams and diversity programs, with education no higher than third place in the priority list?
As in men, sexual contact was most likely to be the source of infection among transgender women, accounting for 89 percent of cases, according to the case series, published on Thursday in the journal Lancet. But among cisgender women and nonbinary individuals who were assigned female at birth, only 61 percent of cases could be connected to sexual contact.
Oh. So men caught the disease one way, and women another. Not a darn thing to do with gender. It would have been so much simpler to just say “men” and “women”, but no, the researchers and reporters needed to go through all these verbal contortions.
And note, there are “men”, but they don’t go through verbal contortions to leave out “nonbinary people who were assigned female at birth” or “transgender men”. They know what a “man” is, but not a “woman”.
Funny that it’s “As in men, sexual contact was most likely to be the source of infection among transgender women” when surely it should be “As in men and nonbinary people, sexual contact was most likely to be the source of infection among transgender women.”
Journalist E J Rosetta has had a change of mind (“peaked”, she calls it) after researching what was intended to be a critical piece on J. K. Rowling:
“3 months of dedicated research & I cannot find a single truly transphobic JK Rowling quote that stands up against the scrutiny of journalistic integrity.
The abuse JK has endured is beyond forgiveness. Every death threat, r*pe threat & torrent of abuse, she has born w/ grace. ”
Cringeworthy pablum in a Facebook post image/meme from a group called “Gender Inclusive Schools”:
What if parenting became less about telling our children who they should be and more about asking them again and again forever who they already are? Then, when they tell us, we would celebrate instead of concede. It’s not: I love you no matter which of my expectations you meet or don’t meet. It’s: my only expectation is that you become yourself. The more deeply I know you, the more beautiful you become to me.
– GLENNON DOYLE
I can see the superficial point of not turning kids into personal projects and trying to force-fit them into molds. But the wording and implications of the actual text are troubling. It might not be so troubling if this kind of wording was not so often used to obscure important issues, but that’s what we have.
Once again, the confused use of “who you are” causes problems. I’m sure most of what they are talking about here are physical characteristics or aspects of character and mental state. “Who you are” is a particular individual, regardless of what you look like or how you act. “That’s not who I am” is more accurately “That’s not the way I wish to act” or “wish to be perceived” or “would like to be treated” or “prefer to look”. Yes, of course parents provide guidance on behavior and expectations; no, parents generally don’t wonder if their child is really a different person, perhaps a 13th century monk.
I don’t think it is at all appropriate to intend to celebrate everything children think or feel about themselves. Children sometimes feel pretty crappy about themselves; there is no reason to celebrate that. But even more positive things may be strongly at odds with the views of the parents, and I think advocating “celebration” is asking the parents to lie. I have great respect for people who can accept that other people, including their own children, might pursue something that the parents find awful, and the parents might support them in this endeavor, but I think demanding that the parents stop thinking this endeavor is awful, and even celebrate it, is too much. I see a lot that kind of sentiment in this meme. No, we parents don’t need to celebrate everything, nor even allow it.
It seems obvious to me that a hidden aspect of “who they are” in this meme has to do with gender identity and sexuality. As before, I don’t think parents are obliged to celebrate a child’s declaration, nor even to agree. I hope sensible parents can push back against gender identity declarations, and assert that people are not born in the wrong body, it isn’t possible to change sex, sex is a biological characteristic. I do hope that all parents, whether they agree or not with these declarations, can express love for their children.
The absurdity of that proposition should be self-evident (“Serial murderer is what he is, and I love him for that”), but I wonder how they would feel if their child came out as a gender critical feminist.
You really wonder if the person who wrote this made the slightest attempt to imagine how it would play out in real life, with real kids.
“Who you are is a drug user.”
“Who you are is a girl being groomed by the creepy dude next door.”
“Who you are is a kid who gets drunk at parties and drives too fast.”
“Who you are is a gun fetishist with a grudge.”
“The more deeply I know you, the more beautiful you become to me.” Parent of the year, that one! Even “good kids” need guidance, and boundaries!
Even if this were only intended to apply in the narrow field of a kid’s sense of gender identity, I would think that if “who you are” includes being deeply unhappy with one’s body, it would be more compassionate to try to alleviate the root of the problem than to play along with a child’s delusion.
The 11th Circuit just released its decision reversing Judge Cannon’s order appointing a special master. That case is remanded with instructions to dismiss.
No doubt Trump will request review by the Supreme Court, but I don’t like his chances. The SCOTUS majority may consist largely of conservative hacks, but none of them seem to be willing to go to bat for Trump’s personal interests as opposed to those of the GOP generally.
So I was reading this article on how the Effective Altruism movement is grappling with the exposure of Bankman-Fried as a crook, and came across this odd but familiar reference:
“E.A. leadership” is a nebulous term, but there is a small annual invitation-only gathering of senior figures, and they have conducted detailed conversations about potential public-relations liabilities in a private Slack group. In public, MacAskill was particularly preoccupied with the idea of a “PR disaster, esp among some of the leadership” that might undermine the movement, as “Elevatorgate,” a sexual scandal, had for the New Atheists.
I don’t really have a point to make, just thought it was amusing.
I just found this unpleasant article, “How To Start A Fire” by someone called Ben Miller.
In this piece, Miller blames gender-critical activists for the terrible shooting at Club Q. He lumps people who object to the use of puberty blockers to treat young people with gender dysphoria in with conservatives and fascists. it’s quite a rant:
As reported elsewhere here on B&W I was granted a Substack blog account and I think it’s a shame to let it go to waste. I did get around to writing my first post, a brief essay on the notion that transgender rejection is a RW thing:
Letter to the New York Times from Professor Marc B. Garnick about the use of Lupron as a “puberty blocker”.
Professor Garnick has studied the effects of Lupron for the FDA. He says we are still learning about the effects of the drug on older people, and “woefully little safety data” are available for Lupron’s effects on children and adolescents.
The 12-year-old girl in question, Jenny, is, in fact. a girl. She got a short haircut. Some dad with a daughter on the opposing soccer team referred to Jenny using masculine pronouns. Jenny’s teammates corrected him by saying “You need to check your pronouns, buddy”. Jenny’s father gets tied up in knots about how Jenny has “identified with her birth gender for her entire life”, and wonders if the other man was concerned about an unfair advantage or was making a political statement about trans people. Jenny’s father also offers to discuss “why you’re so concerned with the body parts below our daughter’s beautiful head of hair”.
In the current climate, I can’t fault the man for wondering, nor can I fault him using masculine pronouns for someone who he thought was male. The correction is not about pronouns, but rather that Jenny is a girl with short hair. If Jenny were actually a trans-identified male, I would assume that well-meaning “trans allies” would similarly say that Jenny is a girl with short hair, and not turn it into a question of not knowing the bespoke pronouns of everyone in the world, including those you’ve never spoken a word to. If the man were in fact told that Jenny is a girl, then maybe he was being rude by continuing to use them, but if it was about “checking pronouns”, that’s just nonsense.
The man may indeed have been concerned about the unfair advantage of having a boy on the team, and that’s a legitimate concern, although perhaps less so at 12 than a few years later. I’m sure the “body parts” Jenny’s father was talking about were primary and secondary sex characteristics; he was missing things like height, bone density, musculature, body shape, and other characteristics that do provide sports advantages to males.
There do appear to be other instances, mentioned but not described in detail, where Jenny was presumed to be a boy. In the current climate,entirely too many girls are influenced to pretend to be boys, and one thing they might do is cut their hair short. I don’t know how Jenny’s father expects people to tell the difference. He seems accepting of the idea that girls pretending to be boys shall be referred to as boys, but dammit he wants his daughter to be seen as a girl. even by strangers. People have been mistaking short-haired girls for boys, and long-haired boys for girls, for many years, since well before the current “gender ideology” craze, but it’s worse now, and he doesn’t see that.
And those two men are in there as “first trans woman to do x”, whereas there are women on the list who have won the Fields medal, Olympic medals, risked their lives in numerous ways…
“First bloke to do X while pretending to be a woman” does not exactly compare to those achievements.
In June 2021, paleontologist Melanie During submitted a manuscript to Nature that she suspected might create a minor scientific sensation. Based on the chemical isotope signatures and bone growth patterns found in fossilized fish collected at Tanis, a renowned fossil site in North Dakota, During had concluded the asteroid that ended the dinosaur era 65 million years ago struck Earth when it was spring in the Northern Hemisphere.
But During, a Ph.D. candidate at Uppsala University (UU), received a shock of her own in December 2021, while her paper was still under review. Her former collaborator Robert DePalma, whom she had listed as second author on the study, published a paper of his own in Scientific Reports reaching essentially the same conclusion, based on an entirely separate data set. During, whose paper was accepted by Nature shortly afterward and published in February, suspects that DePalma, eager to claim credit for the finding, wanted to scoop her—and made up the data to stake his claim.
DePalma failed to include the raw data from the isotope studies his findings were based on, did not include on the sampling techniques and protocols, or the name of lab that was used for the analysis. Also, in an extreme version of “the dog ate my homework,” the technician who is said to have performed the isotope work has since died, and is unavailable for comment.
Along with this, During noted some oddities in the data that was presented. Her critique makes interesting reading. Much of it is far too technical for me to fully grasp, but from what I do get, it sure seems that DePalm’s paper sounds pretty dodgy.
PZ praises the students of his university, and shows what petty shits they are (students and PZ both):
To celebrate the end of classes, we have two big events this weekend at UMM. […]
And then, top off Saturday night with the Yule Ball. This is a photo of a decorative pile of tchotchkes that were on a table. I like the sentiment on the button.
What follows is a photo of some decorative crap, including a badge with the message “JK Rowling fucking sucks”.
In Scotland women who complain about trans ID males in their women only hospital wards may be removed, and the administrators equate such complaints with racism.
A passage in the Ayrshire and Arran policy likens its given scenario to racism. It says: “If a white woman complained to a nurse about sharing a ward with a black patient or a heterosexual male complained about being in a ward with a gay man, we would expect our staff to act in a manner that deals with the expressed behaviour immediately.”
…
However, MBM said: “The Equality Act specifically allows for the recognition of sex in the provision of services. In the context of hospital accommodation, sex is relevant to patient privacy, dignity, modesty, and safety.”
The firm added: “The equivalence between a female patient expressing unease at the presence of another male patient on a nominally single-sex ward and racism is not only offensive, but fails to understand the law.”
It said its research had found that “boards are either failing to guarantee single-sex accommodation (in clinical areas where this is feasible), or do not have policies in place”.
American Girl dolls jumps on the trans bandwagon. It’s all about promoting body positivity through drugs.
Critics were especially bothered by the book’s mention of what a doctor might suggest: choosing gender-affirming clothes (sic) and pronouns or taking puberty blockers.
I delved into the comments, and came across this unintentionally comical exchange:
Commenter 1:
Stop getting in our spaces and we will leave you alone. Stop demanding to be put in women’s prisons, play in women’s sports, go into women’s rape crisis centers and dressing rooms. Leave our children alone. Stop bullying us, and we will leave you alone to live your lives. We will be your allies and supporters. But not now, not yet, not while we have to fight to protect our hard-won rights.
Commenter 2 responds:
Which “spaces” are being invaded? Your lunch counters perhaps?
You are crying about your rights while getting angry about someone exercising theirs. A little self-awareness would not be amiss here.
This ad, and the glowing uncritical article, seem backwards to me. For those who don’t wish to view the video: a grandfather buys makeup and secretly learns to apply makeup to his face. When his grandson, who has decided he is female, comes to visit, the grandfather helps him with makeup before introducing him as a “granddaughter”, and as such he is accepted and welcomed by the family.
If the young man were simply effeminate and gender nonconforming, it would make perfect sense for the grandfather to experiment with makeup and women’s clothing to show the grandson acceptance. The grandfather’s acts of helping the young man with the makeup also fits perfectly well with this variant of the story.
But the young man is claiming to be a young woman. The grandfather is not claiming to be a grandmother. It is possible to learn to apply makeup to someone else without applying it to yourself, and I suspect those are somewhat distinct skills. I would think that a man performing femininity, while making no claims whatsoever of being female, might be perceived as mocking the “trans” youth.
Imagine if a Christian youth converted to Judaism, so the grandfather tried wearing a kippah and growing payos and wearing tallit, as if the appearance, rather than the religious practice and the actual claim of being Jewish, were the most important thing.
It’s a collection of people’s peaking stories. I have the Kindle version, but I’d recommend the paperback, it’s one of those books that’s good to flick through. Some of the stories are heartbreaking.
I went to the book launch event, which was some high quality TERFing. As you might have heard, Sarah advertised it on EventBrite who pulled the event for “Hateful, Dangerous, or Violent Content.” Then the venue contacted her to ask her not to mention the venue online because they were afraid of violence. In the end, there was no ‘protest’ at all, which was almost an anti-climax.
Sarah is suing EventBrite and has a crowdfunder here:
Now I’ll confess I’ve never seen an Adam Sandler movie–the most I’ve seen is a few previews, plus some of his SNL routines, and frankly life is too short to sit through an Adam Sandler movie–so I’m probably in no position to criticize the award. But there’s something more basic that’s bugging me. Mark Twain was a writer. He gave some public performances of his material, of course, but he earned his fame through his writing.
Here is a list of the winners of the award over the years. Some of them are (or were) very funny (Richard Pryor, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin); others, not so much (Will Ferrell? Really?). But with the exception of Neil Simon, none of them are famous for their writing. They’re entertainers, not writers (and even Simon’s writing is meant to be performed, not read). So why do they get an award named for a writer and not, say, Dave Barry or Alexandra Petri?
They should rename it the Groucho Marx award. Then at least it wouldn’t be a category error, even when it’s a travesty.
A twitter thread by my friend Henrietta who, as you will see, is a total badass.
This is happening to disabled women who need care. I can only barely begin to understand the anxiety she and other women must feel if their care can’t be guaranteed to be provided by an old-fashioned woman of the female sex.
I do know that whenever my chair is out of commission, I am frantic. I know I’m usually angry enough that the Hulk would take a few steps back, but I’m fairly stoic about myself and what’s happened to me. But here’s me saying I am frantic if I don’t have use of my wheelchair, even if I’m not planning to go anywhere. Stands to reason, it hits me in my voonrables.
And here’s Henrietta, describing her daily routine and saying why she needs care from a woman. She’s been abused for days by men and women who say that she should not be allowed to put her safety, dignity, autonomy and anxiety above the feelings of men who want to abuse vulnerable women.
There are a few people who’ve made me feel humble over the last fifty years. H is one. She’s such a delightful. funny woman who cares about everybody before she cares for herself.
Read her stuff, if you can bear Twitter.
And Ophelia: you could do worse than ask if she’ll expand on her thread here, if you think it fits.
I think he was very good in The Wedding Singer. His stand-up rap about “phone, wallet, keys” is hilarious. I don’t think I’ve seen the entirety of any of his other movies, because they are usually in a “goofy comedy” genre I don’t usually bother to watch, but the portions I’ve seen are not impressive.
Excellent point that so many of the winners have produced no well-known literary humor.
I think I disagree a little about the Mark Twain award and the idea that Richard Pryor, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin are not writers but entertainers. They all write/wrote their own material, don’t/didn’t they? Aren’t they writer/performers? The thing about Twain is that he started out as a humorist. I know nothing about the award but I’m guessing it’s for people who do both? Write their own material and perform it?
Futrelle posted about Rowling’s crisis shelter. Guess what? Apparently the whole thing is just a cynical move to make something the poor men that want to be women can’t have.
The exclusion of trans women from Beira’s Place isn’t a bug; it seems to be a, if not the, primary motivation behind the service.
It’s true that some of the past winners of the award wrote their own material, or at least much of it, but I don’t think it’s true of all of them (Lorne Michaels? Julia Louis-Dreyfus? Jay Leno?). And I’m not disparaging performers or comedy writers as a group–clearly it takes talent to do it well, and many of the winners of the prize are (or were) brilliant. But writing to perform is a different talent than writing to be read–unless you have the talent of Shakespeare, the full impact doesn’t come across on the page. It’s like giving Dylan the Nobel for literature–whatever you think of his songwriting, I’d argue that it’s a different category than literature.
Also, Wikipedia says this about the award (I tried accessing the Kennedy Center site, but it won’t let me in):
…it is presented to individuals who have “had an impact on American society in ways similar to” Twain. The JFK Center chose Twain due to his status as a controversial social commentator and his “uncompromising perspective of social injustice and personal folly.”
I can sort of see how that applies to some of the winners, but does anyone think that Will Ferrell has an “uncompromising perspective of social injustice and personal folly”?
I wasn’t talking about the whole list, which I haven’t looked at. Just those three specific examples got my attention because of the writing their own material aspect.
But hey, it’s the Kennedy Center. What even is that? Kennedy himself was one of those inflated figures so maybe it’s sort of appropriate that it pretends Jay Leno is a Great Writer.
Good point. (The Kennedy Center is sort of a quasi-official performing arts center in DC. It puts on Important Performances in a venue that probably seemed modern when it was designed in the sixties. We’ve seen some good shows there over the years, but it’s not cutting edge.)
The usual lie is packaged in the article heading – the issue is male athletes in girls’ sports. Par for the course.
A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit that challenged a Connecticut policy allowing transgender students to compete in girls’ high school sports.
The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected claims by four cisgender female students that the policy deprived them of wins and athletic opportunities by requiring them to compete with two transgender sprinters.
They had sued the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC), which oversees scholastic sports in Connecticut, saying its policy violated Title IX, a law designed to create equal opportunities for women in education and athletics.
I’ll take correction from a lawyer, but the argument that a right has been breached seems strange to me. As we’ve said in response to Veronica Ivy’s claim ‘access to sports is a right’, no, at least not as an individually stated thing. This seems to me more like a breach of promise undertaken by the athletics association of that (and other) states, as they fail to provide a fair competition despite claiming so.
I suspect this different framing makes the burden on the moving party lighter, as breach of rights often requires stringent judicial tests.
I also take issue with the reasoning supplied in the verdict:
But U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin, writing for a three-judge panel, said that far from being deprived of a “chance to be champions,” the four plaintiffs all regularly competed in state track championships and on numerous occasions came in first.
This is an argument with diminishing returns. It is only true so long as there are other competitions in which female participants can find a fair field, meaning the argument cannot be applied to every competition available – once the last competition succumbs, the premise of the argument – that there are other avenues available to women – is no longer true. And if an argument cannot be applied generally, then it seems it is not generally valid but relies on externalities to mitigate the impact its own successes.
Absolutely dreadful article by someone called Naomi Gordon-Loebl in the Nation magazine. It’s called “Reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in the Age of Ron DeSantis.”
“These attacks, from the legislative to the interpersonal, have called upon trans people to prove our identities. Even mainstream news outlets regularly question our legitimacy: In October 2022, The New York Times ran a piece noting, and at times tut-tutting, an increase in top surgery among young people.”
2002: “If you don’t support George W. Bush and Tony Blair, then you support Osama Bin Laden.””
2022: “If you don’t support mastectomies for lesbian and autistic teenage girls, then you support Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.”
Sex Matters posted this blog entry and they include an analysis in three parts of the weakness in the science that claims to support an affirmation model for transgender children:
In the gender-affirming care literature, reports of mental-health benefits tend to get recycled. Few papers look at the original studies through a critical lens. Instead, findings are inflated and limitations overlooked. A fresh analysis of the evidence base is urgently needed, in which the studies are reviewed and re-interpreted to remove unjustified claims of benefit. This should be a priority for clinics, universities, funders and journals.
The supposed benefits of social transition also give way under scrutiny. Using a different name and pronouns for a gender-questioning child is linked to gender dysphoria persisting. We don’t know if the link is causal – but the possibility should not be ignored by schools and other institutions that are supposed to put child safeguarding ahead of all other considerations. Schools that accommodate social transition, for example new names, “preferred pronouns” and perhaps even allowing children to use facilities for the opposite sex if that is how they identify, should rethink. It is anything but kind to act in ways that prolong children’s distress.
And, yes, I know that this will not be persuasive to the people it really needs to reach (affirmation therapists,) because they will look at the source and decide that it’s transphobic hatred. I plan to read the articles today since I am on PTO for the week, and make notes for my substack.
The House Select Committee has announced its criminal referrals, including four against Il Douchebag of Sea-to-Lake. But one thing that caught my attention:
Those who have cast doubt on whether the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was truly an “insurrection” have argued that, if it were, there would have been more weapons.
The committee’s report reveals that plenty were seized at the magnetometers outside where Trump gave his speech on the Ellipse before the riot.
Specifically, the report cites a November 2021 document produced by the U.S. Capitol Police that says: “Secret Service confiscated a haul of weapons from the 28,000 spectators who did pass through the magnetometers: 242 canisters of pepper spray, 269 knives or blades, 18 brass knuckles, 18 tasers, 6 pieces of body armor, 3 gas masks, 30 batons or blunt instruments, and 17 miscellaneous items like scissors, needles, or screwdrivers.”
I don’t think the Secret Service blocked off the whole Mall; if not, you can imagine all the weapons that weren’t confiscated.
Apparently NASA is considering an all-female crew for a mission to Mars. The reason, according to a NASA article from 2014, is that women are smaller, less resource-intensive, and better able to withstand the rigors of such a flight. An inflammatory, undated headline recently lampooned by a friend of mine (no article link, just a screen shot) claimed it was to prevent the astronauts from having sex; the ensuing discussion (after they got off the topic of lesbian sex) assumed it was all about pregnancy prevention.
I might have expected this friend and others of his friends to say, “No, they can still get pregnant, because some of the women might be trans”. They are generally consistent trans advocates. But no. They tacitly recognize that NASA saying “all-female” really means all-female, not all-people-who-claim-to-be-women. They know what women are. They know there are differences. They just refuse to acknowledge them when inconvenient.
Yeah, it’s both as hilarious and infuriating as it sounds. It lists phrases deemed offensive, alternatives to use instead and the reason for the phrases being offensive in the first place.
Enjoy. But I think it’s worth pointing out their explanation of why “Karen” is offensive and the alternatives:
Word: Karen
Alternative: demanding or entitled White woman [capitalisation theirs]
Reason: This term is used to ridicule or demean a certain group of people based on their behaviors [crazy American spelling theirs*].
It’s… interesting that what I assume is a bloated committee of language police so completely failed to understand that the problem with “Karen” is the misogyny. Interesting but unsurprising.
* Oops, I mean surprising/wild US Citizen spelling
I’m extremely worried about the disastrous vote in Scotland about GRA ‘reform’. I still hold out some hope that there’s a legal avenue; Scotland must still abide by the Equality Act and this seems in flagrant defiance of it.
But I’m worried in particular about disabled women in Scotland, for a very particular reason. I explained it here.
This year’s defense budget means 61 F-35s… As much as they’ve annoyed me as an over engineered waste of resources over the years it does mean I needn’t worry about employment for a while. Wouldn’t mind seeing them escort humanitarian flights in Ukraine.
How many ways can the patriarchy tell women and girls that they must express feminity, or they will be shoved back into a gender cage. Not content with Joan of Arc, now the writer of a novel about women and girls must have been trans because she chafed against the gender roles of her time.
Siiiiiiiiiiigh. That’s always been right on the surface with Alcott – everyone already knows it. See also: Willa Cather. Cue the headlines: there have always been women who didn’t embrace “femininity,” and they were still women. The Times must be desperate for filler.
Sack @78 I think I interpreted the beginning of the ad as the grandfather being a cross dresser in private, and not wanting the grandson to share in his shame, and nowadays it’s more acceptable, so he goes all out with his grandson? Maybe I was looking at a different aspect of it. I like your take on it better.
Ray already knew the get-me-the-manager “Karen” stereotype — privileged, entitled and demanding — when she saw a TikTok video about a company called Karens for Hire (“We Karen so you don’t have to”), which promised to harness the power of accomplished complainers in the service of beaten-down customers, abused tenants and anyone else with a dispute that outstripped their own capacity to carp.
I do note that they have both men and women working for them.
They knew latching onto “Karens” — the aggressively coifed, White matriarchs of meme menace — would be catchy marketing, but also provocative. Not everyone is amused.
They were profiled last summer by the local CBS affiliate morning show, “Pittsburgh Today Live,” only to find the segment disappear online. Someone had apparently objected to the Karen concept. The station, KDKA, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“We’re not talking about screaming at the barista,” said Zecca. “We want to harness the power of Karens for good.”
Indeed, some who tried to join their team have been too Karen.
“How stupid are you? This is not that hard to figure out,” one applicant said in a test call before Zecca could lunge for the mute button and take over.
Yeah, so rather than push back against the “Karen” stereotype, they go with it and “harness” it. I’m not convinced.
An article by Ceri Black that you might like. Ceri knows what she’s talking about. She did a PhD in queer theory and was fully mired in it for years. And now she’s being sued by Aiden Comorford, quite a journey.
Anyway, there are some interesting points in there from a queer theorist’s position.
Well, ain’t this a kick in the pants. Here’s a compilation of failed concepts in psychology, for example, the oft-mentioned Stanford Prison Experiment is a badly done botch, the Pygmalion effect is small and inconsistent, the Milgram experiment is full of experimental errors, etc., etc., etc. It’s rather depressing.
…
The impression I get is that a lot of the popular ideas that have emerged out of psychology arise not because the experimenter is rigorous and cautious, but because they either conform to conventional wisdom or are surprisingly contrary. There’s also something analogous to the TED Talk effect, where people are convinced more by the certainty of the presentation of the story than by the data.
Huh. I wonder if this is applicable to anything popular today?
Alabama is involved in a legal fight over whether the state can criminalize certain aspects of “gender-affirming care”. It has subpoenaed WPATH, the AAP, and the Endocrine Society. The three organizations have filed a motion to quash the state subpoenas, claiming that the scope is overly broad and violates their First Amendment rights. I don’t know if they are justified, I don’t know if what the state is trying to do is reasonable, but I do get the distinct impression that the organizations have a lot to hide and are trying to do so.
That’s it! Just the title, no content. Three authors.
The contents are in fact identical to that of a paper in Annals of Improbable Research many years ago. The title of that paper was “Recent advances in artificial intelligence”. Plagiarism?
The brilliant Nina Paley was crowdfunding a comic book. Indiegogo cancelled it after it had met and exceeded the goal. No explanation, no chance for appeal, the money has already been returned to the donors.
Further evidence that the trans movement is about reinforcing gender stereotypes. One of Angelina Jolie’s daughters has decided she doesn’t want to be a boy after all. But this manifests itself in changing from comfortable, baggy clothes to a hand-me-down designer dress from her mother, along with putting her hair up in a bun and putting on makeup. At least she’s not wearing heels. And of course the narrative is all about how beautiful she looks now.
She’s 15 years old.
Why can’t the narrative be that girls are allowed to wear baggy pants and jackets? (Or for that matter that boys can wear dresses and makeup?)
Prince Harry claims to have ended the lives of 25 “chess pieces” (aka human beings) and also claims to be neither satisfied or embarrassed by it. Callous much?
A man in Ecuador has declared himself a woman in order to take advantage of Ecuadorian laws that favor the mother in child custody cases. Trans activists have said that his actions are “not in the spirit of the law”. No shit, Sherlock.
But a man who suddenly decides he’s a woman in order to be moved from men’s prison to women’s prison, or to use the women’s locker room, or to compete on the women’s team, that’s perfectly fine.
Terry Gross interviews Lauren Fleshman, an elite runner and the author of a new book, Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World. Fleshman makes many excellent points about the physical differences between men and women, and how so many things in women’s sports either fail to take those differences into account or are there for pleasing the male gaze. But somehow, when it comes to trans ideology, she suddenly loses the plot, and thinks it is possible both to be aware of sex differences and have women compete alongside men.
I’m guessing Fleshman knows that directly stating that males claiming to be women should not compete against females would cause her a lot of trouble. So she says inclusion of trans athletes is important, even though males have physical advantages of females when it comes to sport. But she doesn’t try to explain how that could be done. The trouble is that it really can’t be done but we mustn’t say that because it would hurt trans people. Or, rather, trans people would throw a fit. I can understand Fleshman not wanting to be a target herself.
I’m going to the Standing For Women event in Newcastle today (https://twitter.com/SFWnortheast/status/1613794277183852546). There are expected to be ‘counter-protesters’ there (by which I mean crybabies in masks) so there might be interesting things to report.
If you want to follow what’s happening on Twitter, the official account is @SFWnortheast and the most relevant tags are #LetWomenSpeak, #LetWomenSpeakNewcastle, #WomenTalking.
I expect footage of the talks (if they are allowed to take place) will be on KJK’s various spaces at some point. I’ll be filming what I can, but I won’t be able to get decent footage of the talks. I need my hands to get around so I’ll be using a chest-mounted camera and I’ll be in a crowd. And The mic isn’t great.
Ok, I usually don’t comment directly on what goes on over at Pharyngula but I am going to say something about what’s apparently not going on: any mention of the Minnesota art professor fired for showing some paintings of Mohammed.
Maybe I missed it. Or maybe PZ has some personal or professional relationships with people involved and has prudently declined to comment. But this is exactly the sort of topic which would have once provided much material for posts and discussion. Despite all reasonable efforts, Muslim sensibilities are performatively “offended” by the mere presence of once-revered depictions of their prophet. It’s a perfect opportunity to rail about separation of church & state, as well as the way fundamentalist religion both infantilizes the believers and induces them to control others. It’s even local. But … nothing.
One possibility: religious identities have become included with marginalized racial & gender identities and to attack one is to implicitly attack them all. If it’s wrong for a Muslim to be psychologically scarred by Islamic art in an academic setting, it’s now arguably wrong for a trans-identified student to be psychologically scarred by gender critical views in an academic setting. Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Plus, being on the same side as religious Christian conservatives may no longer be considered an occasional and incidental byproduct of a consistent liberal commitment to integrity. It’s a red flag for being on the wrong side.
A no-brainer became a choice, and then the opposite choice became obviously better. I still find it surprising.
Ah well the more conformist of PZ’s commenters decided I was “Islamophobic” around the time of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, so it’s possible that he’s avoiding the Hamline issue lest they accuse him of “Islamophobia.” He’s captive to them at this point.
Scottsdale is one of the more conservative suburbs in Phoenix, but even that city’s government is too much government for a roque development out in the foothills. The people who built there, (in the desert) to escape government are now pissed that the governmet is not catering to their water needs. I used to hike near there, occasionally. Yes, it’s an idyllic location for living away from the hustle-and-bustle and the desert hills are beautiful. But this is a water issue in a dry state, and they’ve known this was coming for years and should not have built out there. The wells are dry.
The Washington Post had an excellent, disturbing series recently on abuse in the bodybuilding world, including of course sexual exploitation of female bodybuilders. Karen Attiah followed up with a mostly excellent opinion piece, pointing out that even female bodybuilders are vulnerable to the male gaze and male abuse. I say “mostly excellent” because this is the final paragraph:
There has been a ton of fuss about transgender athletes in women’s sports, with some claiming that allowing trans women to compete is a form of “abuse.” No. The abuse of women in bodybuilding is a reminder that the biggest threats to women and girls in sports are — and always have been — men.
Transwomen are indeed biological men. As such, trans identifying men who enter women’s sports cause terrible distress to women on many levels: forced shared private space, inevitable loss in sports to XY humans, girls/women’s compelled speech to use trans identifying man/boy’s preferred pronouns when one’s eyes sees the lie, terror of speaking truth to power because of financial consequences. So trans identifying male forcing himself into domain of women/girls’ sports is as vile as the male body builders you rightly vilify in this article.
It speaks volumes that whenever woman intersects with a protected group, woman ALWAYS loses. We are devalued everywhere. In the East, we are erased from public view by hijab, niqab, and chador. In West, woman is erased from language to now include men in skirts. That change in language affects policy and law. Trans identifying men are able to transfer to women’s prisons where they terrorize, beat, rape and impregnate female prisoners. But it seems nothing beats support for trans, not even lesbian, Black women in prison.
And you, Karen, are part of the devaluation of Woman when you do not stand up for our rights to privacy, our own spaces, in sports, women in prison having to share space with rapists, and protection of girls from out- sourced self-harm by medical community which performers mutilating surgeries, hormone suppressants and cross hormones on vulnerable people. All to further the delusion of those vulnerable people that they are born in wrong body. No one is born in the wrong body. We are our bodies.
A 17 year old girl is showering at the YMCA when a naked man walks in.
Here’s a video of her talking about how terrified she was. She is visibly upset thinking about her five year old sister and her friends being in that same locker room.
She spoke to the YMCA who confirmed that it’s just fine for grown men to shower with teenagers in their facilities and was made to feel as though she was at fault for simply asking
Here are some of the comments this seventeen year old woman received on Twitter.
There’s another Standing for Women event (similar to the one in Newcastle last week) in Glasgow on 5th February. I think I will probably go. It’s the same drill but there are lots of people going who I Twitter-know and would like to meet in person. Plus, who wouldn’t want to take that train journey along the north east coast?
But, more importantly, I found out yesterday that Scotland’s largest Furry convention will also be in town! It also includes the adult baby men!
How could I not go? The train up there will be like a mobile zoo!
I don’t expect much aggro between the feminists and the furries unless someone leaves the gate open and the furries escape *whistles innocently*. It’s OK, though, the women are all going to be armed with bottles of Febreze, which should ward the furries off. I’m not sure what to do about the adult baby men, though. It’s not as though punishment is going to work, is it? They’d just be back for more.
Anyway, noon on the 5th, at a TBA location near Queen St Station (the SFW thing, not the furry thing). The one after that is in Hyde Park on 26th, if anyone’s in London.
Got this as a reply to my recruiting for a D&D game in my local FB social group: “However, I’m very into heavy role playing and am very queer so a queer friendly role playing group is something I am desiring.” It’s good for me to belong to the FB group, so I don’t want to ruffle any feathers, but fuck my life…
I think it’s a bloody TIF, but this I think is why we should’ve kept gatekeeping nerd shit… “Yes you can play, but you’re going to play *our* game; if you want something different do it somewhere else.”
This is a scoldy tweet from a writer. I am not familiar with her, but apparently she thinks she is brilliant. I don’t know if your comment section will allow this sort of embedding, but I’ll give it a go. If it doesn’t work, I’ll add a new comment and just post a link to it.
Cis men don’t need to pretend to be trans women to assault women. Trans women have been using women’s spaces by self-ID for years. The equality act covers this. You’re arguing the lie that something is changing when it’s already the status quo without issue.— Sara Gibbs (@Sara_Rose_G) January 19, 2023
This is the “men have already been invading women’s spaces for years, and the GRR doesn’t really change things, so just accept this new piece of paper” argument. And what we take out of this is the very tone-deaf repetition that there is only one demographic whose needs are important, and everyone else needs to accommodate them. Much like the guy in BC who only feels “comfortable in women’s spaces because men are muscular and I’m a slob,” it doesn’t really matter how the women in the restrooms, gyms, prisons, and other spaces where they are vulnerable to sexual assault, battery, or even just the leering that men do, as long as the men get access.
And, yes, it’s only really a problem for men in women’s spaces. Trans ID women do not bother men in private spaces because we are very rarely subject to such assaults by women, and are often flattered by women or men checking us out in the gym. We take it as admiration, not as intrusion.
What she conveniently ignores, or has decided doesn’t matter, is that this is a men’s movement to break away what few barriers have been propped up to give women space away from men. One wonders what trans ID males did to pee back when public office buildings only provided restrooms for men. Did they have to “hold it” until they got home, as women did? Did they have the urinary leash?
And another thing that is completely illogical about this GRR fracas: if it really changes nothing, then why is it so important to steamroll it through and to create a crisis in Scottish Devolution? It’s either absolutely vital or no big deal, it can’t be both.
And another thing that is completely illogical about this GRR fracas: if it really changes nothing, then why is it so important to steamroll it through and to create a crisis in Scottish Devolution? It’s either absolutely vital or no big deal, it can’t be both.
Just like TERFs are a tiny minority of cranks who should be, and deserve to be marginalized and ignored, and an all-powerful cabal just moments away from unleashing trans genocide. Same tune, different lyrics.
I saw a notice that Women’s Declaration International would be at Artifacts Gallery in Athens OH. Why? I searched. AG is a clothing store. They posted some signage in favor of women and disagreeing with gender identity ideology. So of course there’s a boycott and a protest.
I found this article about the planned protest, and it’s the usual nonsense. The sign saying LGB with a rainbow and a heart? Not allowed without the T, it’s just part of the word or something. Can’t say people can’t change sex. Can’t say no to men in women’s sports. For these horrible statements, the store had to close temporarily.
“Oh, and that’s not even the full video. Apparently the proper one goes on for 25 minutes of the same.”
Jones has a *monomaniacal* obsession with his imagined “anti-trans activists,” who are “frothing about trans people”, who have “allowed [their] humanity to rot away” and whose “anger and fury and bile” are a fixation for him. I’m not a psychologist, but the aggressive tone suggests a real insecurity about the issue for Jones.
I wonder is there any truth in the rumour that Jones was frustrated about not getting a position in a Corbyn Labour government, and decided to lash out at anyone he suspected of having gender-critical views as a response. He made them the scapegoat for his own disappointment.
Certainly, while Jones supported gender ideology before the December 2019 election defeat, I don’t remember it being the all-consuming obsession for Jones that it is now.
Jones has a *monomaniacal* obsession with his imagined “anti-trans activists,” who are “frothing about trans people”, who have “allowed [their] humanity to rot away” and whose “anger and fury and bile” are a fixation for him. I’m not a psychologist, but the aggressive tone suggests a real insecurity about the issue for Jones.
Seems to me Jones was on the naughty step a little while ago for something or other, so maybe he has to be even more furiously pro-trans in order to demonstrate loyalty, and to deflect further suspicion, running as fast as he can to stay in one place and not lose ground?
“At this point, not noting that many anti-trans parent groups work with the far-right is not just enabling transphobia, it’s enabling fascism. The anti-trans movement is intertwined with the global far-right movement. The NYT is laundering fascism when it launders transphobia.”
Just like TERFs are a tiny minority of cranks who should be, and deserve to be marginalized and ignored, and an all-powerful cabal just moments away from unleashing trans genocide.
So group X is simultaneously weak and cowering, not deserving of our respect or even consideration as humans, and yet a dangerous, devious, all-powerful threat to the superior group’s existence that needs to be eradicated. Where have I heard that before?
A bit of local Alabama news that may be of interest here. This is about the internecine battles within the Alabama Democratic Party. The party has been largely ineffectual for a good few years. Part of the reason has been too much internal fighting about representation, and too little effort at developing and promoting candidates for office.
First, an article about the arguments over proposed by-laws changes. A few years ago, the “old guard” was pushed out, new by-laws written, and life seemed to be coming back to the party. Last year, some of the “old guard” returned to power, life was essentially snuffed out, and fights over the by-laws resumed.
Second, an excellent opinion column by Josh Moon about all this. He pulls no punches. He talks about the continuing fights over the minutiae of representation in a party that is all but irrelevant in the power structures of the state. The party is an extreme state of dysfunction, they promoted almost no candidates this election, they haven’t updated their web site or their Facebook page since August, and this is what they are worrying about.
I think this is yet another example where excessive emphasis on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion concepts has derailed genuine work, be it government, education, or what have you.
before discovering that you needed to be a paid member to post. Not wanting to pay to do that, I thought I’d post it here instead. Keep in mind this was intended for a different audience, so forgive me if it reiterates arguments ideas I’ve made here already. But with fewer swears. The direct link to the story and its comment thread is here:
Why oppose this definition: Women are adult humans who identify as female. As I said above, is it simply an unflinching desire to defend the truth about the dictionary meaning of a word? Or is there something else you object to?
I object to men who claim to be women being put into women’s prisons. This something that is already happening. I object to men claiming to women demanding access to women-only rape shelters. This is already happening. I object to the crimes of men claiming to be women being attributed to women, thus invalidating statistics used in policing, law enforcement and public policy. This is already happening. Why should “gender identity” (whatever that is) have any bearing on facilities, spaces, and positions allocated on the basis of sex? It shouldn’t; they are two completely different things. Yet trans identified males are demanding, and being given access to, what had once been women’s single sex spaces, all on the coat-tails of this new, non-standard definition of “woman.” This is not simply about defending the dictionary meaning of the word woman. It’s more importantly about the health, safety, and dignity of women. That hijacking and distorting language is one of the avenues through which women’s rights and safety are threatened, that is on those pushing the new definition of “woman” that includes men. “Of course transwomen are women! It’s right in the name!” Well, by such logic, sawhorses and pommel horses are horses, and I look forward with interest to their inevitable racing in the Kentucky Derby.
Language is more than just important in this discussion; it is vital. I will digress here to make a note on usage. In the interests of clarity, I do not use the term “transwoman” or “trans woman,” but “trans identified male” to refer to males who, for whatever reason, believe they are, or claim to be, women. They are not women of any kind. They never will be. If this is “transphobic,” then reality is transphobic. Trans identified males remain males however much or little they alter themselves surgically or hormonally. Keeping this fact clear makes discussion more open and honest. It makes what is at stake and what is being demanded more obvious.
Trans activists will sometimes admonish feminists for supposedly conflating “sex” and “gender,” but at other times use this very conflation to advance their cause, regardless of the cost and danger to women. Humans can’t change sex. So that’s a hard no for access to facilities segregated on the basis of sex. But somehow a male “perfoming femininty” is supposed to be given entrance to these spaces because he “identifies as” a woman. Dressing up as a woman is supposedly enough, but not even necessary. Under self identification, or “Self ID,” (which is a concept being pushed in many jurisdictions), any man, “trans” or not can claim to be a woman and gain entrance to women’s single sex spaces. This makes harder for women to defend these spaces, as it removes the ability to prevent any man from entering, because they might “identify as” a woman. This makes it easier for predatory males to access female only spaces. The best course of action is to bar all males from such spaces, however they might “identify”. Demanding entrance to women’s spaces automatically makes any such man a risk. It’s big red flag that women are being told to ignore.
…the real question is why are people so vexed and insistent about this? If you admit that people can change genders, why fixate on “but not sexes.” I don’t buy that it’s just about defending the truth. People who defend the idea that sex is malleable are not more confused about any of the “facts” that their detractors are.
This question works just as well in the opposite direction. People so keenly interested in breaking down the concept of sex, on redefining “woman’ in such a way that it includes men (while, curiously there is nowhere near the equivalent pressure and insistence on redefining “man” ) seem to have an intense interest in allowing men to have acces to women’s spaces, positions and facilities. That seems to be the whole point behind all of these efforts to redefine “woman.” Women are certainly the ones being asked to stand down, step aside and pay the price by letting men in. If humans can’t change sex, then yes, those who see sex as “malleable” are confused about the facts, and one is left to question why they are so insistant on defending something that isn’t so.
Being female is a condition of material reality, not something you can “identify” into if you are not female to start with. A man can no more become a woman through “identifying” as one any more than I can identify as an inverebrate, or as being made of antimatter. My identification and wishful thinking matters not a bit to the universe. I will remain a vertebrate made of ordinary matter for the rest of my life, however fiercely I may “identify.”
It’s interesting that some of the same people who object to Rachel Dolezal’s claim to be Black furiously deny that her imposture has any parallel with the claims of trans identified males, even though unlike sex, racial identity can be a “spectrum” depending on one’s parentage. Whatever one my think of the utility of the concept of “race,” people of diverse ethnic and geographic origins have children all the time, and they can exhibit a wide range of features that one might attribute to “racial” markers: skin colour, blood types, hair types, eye colour, etc. Without further investigation (and the testimony of her family), it could have been the case that Dolezal was of African American heritage. There is no way that a trans identified male is in any way female. The embarassing thing about the Dolezal/trans comparison is that trans claims are less credible, that is to say impossible. Yet rejecting Dolezal’s claim, while accepting those of men claiming to be women, like swimming cheat Wil(Lia)m Thomas is supposedly “progressive.”
In humans, sex is binary and immutible. The existence of people with disorders of sexual development (or, less accurately “intersex”) does not change this. Sex is not a “spectrum;” there is no third sex, no intermediate between sperm and ova. Certainly there is a small number of individuals with conditions of sexual development that represent edge cases, but those people are still male or female. Most DSDs are specific to one sex or the other. Their existence does not suddenly render the concepts of male and female useless and incoherent, any more than dawn and twilight invalidates the concepts of day and night. The cursory nod to so-called “intersex” conditions is simply a way to justify the appropriation of the DSD concept and terminolgy of “assigned (sex) at birth,” as if doctors and midwives attending births have to guess at a newborn’s sex, decide arbitrarily, or flip a coin and write down M or F based solely on heads or tails.
The only reason I can see is that people want to pretend that it’s just a “natural biological fact” that people can’t do whatever thing they want to do, when what they mean is “don’t do that” or “its wrong to do that.” People want you to call a blastocyst a baby because they want to make abortion illegal. People who call BLM protestors “thugs” do so because they oppose BLM. If that’s not you, then what is your reason? I think you could pick a better fight.
This isn’t the winning argument you think it is.
I’ll accept that those who are so keen to change the definition of “woman” to include men want to use this new, idiosyncratic, and counterintuitive definition to do something that the customary, standard one would prohibit, things that would normally be met with “don’t do that,” or “it’s wrong to do that.” So what is it that men want to do in women’s single-sex spaces? It’s a hell of a lot more than “just go pee.” Male sex offenders aren’t suddenly discovering they’re “trans” just to go pee. Mediocre male athletes aren’t jumping to women’s leagues just to “go pee.” This deliberate trivialization and minimization of trans identified males demand to “just go pee” hides the real, brutal cost that women are already paying for accepting these newly-minted “women” who are men int their spaces. This is not accidental. The issue is much more than “bathroom bills,” but women’s real, legitimate concerns are brushed aside as outdated prudery, or vindictive bigotry. Attemps to fight against opportunistic distortion of language is painted as pettifogging bookishness. It’s just one little word: woman. How does expanding the meaning of one little word hurt anybody? I’ll tell you how. How can women defend their rights in law if the law doesn’t know what a woman is.
I am currently reading Linsey McGoey’s The Unknowers, on the value of “strategic ignorance” to the the wealthy and powerful. It’s mind blowing in a way; I had never thought of ignorance as a weapon in the way described in the book. Think plausible deniability on steroids. Think 2008 financial crisis, the Grenfell fire, global warming and all the other environmental problems we face, think coming resource shortages.
I am only a few chapters in, so won’t attempt a summary. But this being the blog it is, I thought I could mention a couple of examples from the book: Treating women as not being important, to the point that they and their contributions are totally forgotten.
Take Milton Friedman. He won the 1976 Nobel memorial prize in economics (not an actual Nobel prize, mind you), in large part based on his book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. His book? Well, he happened to have a co-author named Anna Schwartz. Never heard of her? Me neither. According to the book, “Friedman himself acknowledged that Schwartz was an equal partner in the writing of their masterpiece.” Oh well – she’s just a woman, so what’s the big deal?
Next up, Adam Smith and On Liberty. Again, Smith acknowledged the contribution of his co-author Harriet Taylor, both in the essay itself and even more so in his autobiography. Still, it was published in his name only, and only his name is now associated with this work. I suppose that is just how things were in those days, but still …
Finally, an anecdote from other sources: When Swedish mathematician Gustav Mittag-Leffler learned that the Nobel prize was going to be awarded to Pierre Curie for their work on radioactivity, he stepped in and informed the committee in clear language that Marie Curie (full name Marie Salomea Skłodowska–Curie) deserved the prize in equal measure, for this was an equal collaboration between the two of them. Fortunately, the committee listened, and they received the prize jointly. So hiding the women doesn’t always work. But assistance from well connected and highly regarded men is sometimes necessary.
In this thread, JKR says: “I’m reading the transcript of the tribunal of Mermaids v LGB Alliance. It’s a bit mind-blowing, seeing some of the answers set down in black and white. 1/”
Below is a link to a clip from a very nice performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. The soprano is Elijah McCormack. She has a lovely voice and is a skilled singer.
She also claims to be a he. The WaPo article where I found the link to the clip says:
The 28-year-old trans male soprano, based in Trumbull, Conn., arrived on my radar the last half of 2022, offering stunning performances of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” with the Washington Bach Consort, Handel’s “Messiah” with Ensemble Altera and “St. John Passion” with the Dallas Bach Society. He premiered the role of Bell* Cohen in Benjamin P. Wenzelberg’s “Nighttown” — an operatic recasting of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” In 2023, he’ll make debuts at Seraphic Fire’s Enlightenment Festival (Feb. 23-26) and with Ars Lyrica Houston (May 13), as well as additional engagements singing with Ensemble Altera and the Crossing.
Given the severe effects of testosterone on voices, I suspect she has not gone in for hormone treatments. I wonder if other women-who-claim-to-be-men choose to forgo the (desired) effects of testosterone treatment in order to preserve a singing voice.
There are a small number of adult men with soprano voices. They are sometimes called sopranists, in particular by those who take care to differentiate the voice from that of a countertenor, who is often a falsettist. Wikipedia suggests that they may owe their unusually high voices to endocrinology or to an underdeveloped larynx. Notable male sopranos include Robert Crowe and Michael Maniaci.
It would be perhaps ironic if women started being included in the tiny list of “male sopranos” simply by declaring themselves men.
Video from the Transpositions book launch I went to a while ago. There are some names and faces you will know among the speakers and a live musical performance by Menno!
I haven’t watched it yet. Moley says the sound isn’t great (the venue’s fault, I think, it was a bit echoey.
Hi there, I expect someone here will be able to turn this up–can anyone locate/provide a link to that exchange where PZ Myers claimed there were five (seven?) sexes of horse, and listed various terms for different kinds of horses, and the respondent pointed out that each of these terms described either a male or a female horse?
Colt, filly, mare, broodmare, gelding, stallion…six. There must be six.Oh, wait, I forgot freemartins. So seven. Definitely seven.— PZ Myers (@pzmyers) December 23, 2019
I wonder whether PZ will mention this. I just checked and he’s blogged about 2 American Atheist board members who have sexual allegations against them…
Wow. I’m not surprised, based on what I’ve seen of Dave/Danielle, but this is new information, thanks. I just saw the business about the two American Atheist board members ousted.
“Danielle” and I have (or had) at least one mutual FB friend, and one (female) told him he was more of a woman than she was, in a thread I saw on her page several years ago.
Duh, you’re right. (Egg on my face.) I was mixing up names because the book I was reading also discussed Adam Smith. Apparently, he was not quite the laissez-faire advocate that present day libertarians make him out to be. On the contrary, he argued strongly for government regulation of business, to curb and control the natural consequences of human greed. But that part has largely been excised from many editions of The wealth of nations.
Watch Nicola Sturgeon trying with all her might to avoid calling the rapist either him or her in response to being asked whether he should be considered a woman.
Choirs performing at international rugby matches at the Principality Stadium have been banned from singing the Tom Jones classic, Delilah.
The stadium said it would no longer be performed by choirs after removing it from half-time playlists in 2015.
The song has caused controversy, with lyrics depicting the murder of a woman by her jealous partner.
A stadium spokesman said it was “respectfully aware that it is problematic”.
It has, however, long been popular with supporters of the national team and Jones has previously performed the song ahead of an international match.
The decision follows a week in which the chief executive of the Welsh Rugby Union was forced to resign, following allegations of sexism, misogyny and racism within the organisation.
Without referencing the decision, Wales wing Louis Rees-Zammit wrote on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon: “All the things they need to do and they do that first…”
It’s the lowest-hanging fruit that gets picked first…
Gotta disagree with you on this one. It is about a sexually jealous man murdering a woman. They don’t sing songs about lynching before football matches do they?
Delilah? I had no idea. None. I’ve never paid any attention to the lyrics. It’s got an irritating tune and a catchy refrain, but that’s all the notice I ever took. Wow.
I’ve been listening to Unsafe Space – astonishingly, on the BBC. How long before the cult clamours to have it deleted, I wonder? It is a (mildly amusing, occasionally hilarious) poke at a wide range of ‘woke’ issues. Each episode is around half an hour, and is available online at the above link immediately after the broadcast is finished. The episodes are broadcast on Thursdays at 23:00 UTC.
The latest Mess We’re In (podcast by Arty, Graham Linehan and Helen Staniland) is particularly good. There’s a lot of interesting discussion and the guest is the woman who was assaulted at the Newcastle Let Women Speak event, who is also very good.
Thank you, latsot! I was searching YouTube earlier to see if there was a new one (it feels like months since the last) and got side-tracked watching Arty Morty’s interview of Shape Shifter (very good). I just decided to have a quick look here to see if there are any new comments before renewing my search, to find that you have posted the link!
tigger @ 187 – same. I knew it as an intensely annoying hard-to-ignore song with the repeated “why why whyyyyyyyyyyyyy Deeeliiiiiiilah” and nothing else. I looked it up after reading J.A.’s post. Oh how sweet, yet another extra-popular song that’s about murdering a woman.
Decades ago, if I had claimed that originalist judges would rule that the government can’t convict an abuser who agreed in his restraining order not to own guns and then was found in possession of guns, because dudes in 1789 didn’t think abusive husbands should have their guns taken away, I would have been accused of strawmanning.
They imply, with analogies to the Holocaust, that trans-identified people will be rounded up and killed. Nothing of the sort has been suggested; people have disagreed with gender identity ideology, including saying that people who identify as the opposite sex are not in face the opposite sex, and this view is described as an attempt to “define transgender people out of existence”, therefore genocide. That’s not genocide, that’s disagreement. It’s like disagreeing that Jews are the Chosen People, that there are no Chosen People, therefore Jews are not what they claim they are. It doesn’t kill anyone who claims to be part of the Chosen People, it just says they’re wrong.
Beyond that, I think the article exemplifies some of the kinds of discussion difficulties that have been brought up here. The author and people quoted in it say that doctors, rather than politicians, should decide what constitutes proper medical care for trans-identified people, but the problem is they only talk about doctors who have been swallowed by the ideology; they think their side constitutes the evidence-based, settled science.
The bullet points listed from Trump’s rant (I haven’t listened, but I think everything he says is a rant, so no quibble there) are:
1. Pass a bill that falsely claims there are only two genders, male and female
2. Reverse legislation for life-saving gender affirming healthcare
3. Ban all education of transgender and non-binary issues in schools nationwide
4. Ban transitioning for youth nationwide
5. Sign an executive order to end programs for gender transitioning for all ages nationwide
6. Criminalize and hunt doctors and educators who try to save transgender and non-binary lives
Obviously the framing is incorrect, but the only one I think I’d oppose is number 6. Number 3 might be a problem if the education they were talking about was critical of these issues, focusing instead on how to avoid social contagion and on biological reality, but you know that isn’t what they’re talking about.
It is just awful having to defend proposals from any right-wing demagogue who happened to be correct in one area, but when that demagogue is Trump, it’s worse. I wish the leftist writers at Daily Kos could see, at the very least, that there is legitimate disagreement here, that people on the left also disagree, and that maybe they should examine their own positions a little.
Just a quick note that the Let Women Speak event at noon today in Glasgow (the one with the furries) will be livestreamed on Kelly-Jay Keen’s YouTube channel. Livestreamers will probably be able to see and hear more than those of us who’ll be there.
There’s also an overhead and far away webcam showing the square, which is good because from overhead and far away is my best side.
There are at least three women intending to talk about same-sex care for disabled women, which is especially important and topical in the UK right now. And, of course, there will be much talk of rapists in women’s prisons.
Lots of big gender critical names will be there. It should be a good one.
My apologies, it seems that the Beeb doesn’t like hyperlinks. It won’t work for me, either, although the link has copied and pasted without errors and works when typed in. Try copying this link and pasting it into the address bar:
Ah, it was only an extra quote character at the end of the address. Remove it, and it works. (Ophelia, feel free to fix the link in #188 and delete this post and the previous one. But who am I to tell you to feel free to do what you want on your own blog?)
I’ve been mitigating the boredom of being stuck in bed by listening to Queens Speech podcasts on YouTube again, and I though that you might be interested in this segment which seems to discuss the origins of the plea from the defence of Adam Graham for mitigation because of his sudden claim to womanhood, more than a month before it actually happened. I’m linking to the start of the segment here:
I bet old boundary-breaking Trudeau would just love that. What a way to show, and be lauded for, his commitment to the marginalised and oppressed whilst actually giving everything to white men.
Here’s a very worthwhile read that Jane Clare Jones made available last week. It’s a PDF that can be downloaded and then read, and covers the recent discussion that revolved around feminism and whether or not the gender-critical movement is being co-opted by the right for it’s own purposes. IMO, I think that’s a valid concern and the essays in this publication all have something important to say about it.
#168 Sackbut, how could you doubt the manliness of that singer? Did you not notice the shaved head, or the absence of a dress? Open your eyes!
___
I read a post made by PZ, “Uteruses are scary, so protect them!” Despite the silly name, he is commenting on a very serious blog post written by a Bess Kalb here.
The weirdest thing about the post? PZ was actually the only one to mention women. He closed his post with “Those vile right-wingers who claim to be pro-life are wrecking medical education, shackling doctors’ hands, and condemning women to death. Don’t let them get away with it.” By contrast, Bess’s post avoids the word like the plague, using silly constructions instead: pregnant people of course, but also ‘those of us in stirrups’ and ‘untold Americans’.
She even says (emphasis added) “When Senator Lindsey Graham showed his hand and proposed a national abortion ban, he condemned an entire population…” What’s the population? For fuck sake, name it! She knows very well that the population is women. The right hates women, but she just refuses to say so and so becomes a stooge of the right by covering for them.
The Republican-controlled Missouri House of Representatives rejected a proposal Wednesday that would have banned children from being able to openly carry firearms on public land without adult supervision.
The proposal, which was part of a long debate in the chamber on how to fight crime in St. Louis, was defeated by a vote of 104-39, with just one Republican voting in support of the ban. After the amendment on the open-carry restrictions for minors was initially supported by the Republican legislator sponsoring a broader crime bill, GOP lawmakers on a committee that he leads removed the firearms provision last week.
At least there’s one semi-sane Republican in Missouri.
The “logic” behind voting against the ban:
“Government should prohibit acts that directly cause measurable harm to others, not activities we simply suspect might escalate,” Lovasco, who represents the St. Louis suburb of O’Fallon, told The Washington Post in a statement. “Few would support banning unaccompanied kids in public places, yet one could argue such a bad policy might be effective. While it’s reasonable to be wary of minors’ carrying guns, any solution to juvenile crime needs to be crafted properly and respectful of individual rights.”
Soon they will be repealing age limits for buying alcohol and cigarettes in Missouri. After all, they don’t harm you if you don’t drink or smoke them.
(Random linguistic fact: Turkish uses the same verb–içmek–for drinking and smoking. You drink cigarettes in Turkish.)
Launching a million tonnes of moon dust around Earth could dim sunlight across our planet by 1.8 per cent. This would reduce the global temperature, but whether it would be worth the resources, and the risks involved in such a strategy, are unclear
How well does an engineering approach work on political/economic/biological/geophysical problems? Can you say “unintended consequences?” Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.
At least they’re saying we should still be cutting our CO2 emissions (though there will be some who would use this sort of scheme to carry on as usual. Why change your diet when there are antacids?):
Furthermore, considering an approach like this shouldn’t replace our efforts to decrease carbon emissions on Earth. “We have to keep reducing the greenhouse gases within our own atmosphere, no matter what,” says Bromley. “Our dust shield solution would simply buy us more time.”
I’m not an engineer, just a jumped-up mechanic; so I can’t do the maths required for such an undertaking. But, it seems to me from observing other planets in our own solar system, that such a cloud would make a near-invisible ring around the equator until it fell into the gravity well of either the Moon or the Earth, and cut out an insignificant amount of sunlight. 1.8% reduction seems a tad ambitious, for a project which would dump an enormous amount of additional, avoidable, greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere and could add a catastrophic wobble to the Moon’s orbit. Why not simply plant a lot more trees? Or stop building in swamps, so they can absorb carbon? Or paint the roof of every structure white?
But, it seems to me from observing other planets in our own solar system, that such a cloud would make a near-invisible ring around the equator until it fell into the gravity well of either the Moon or the Earth,….
From my understanding of the idea put forward in the article, what they’re proposing is to situate the dust cloud at the L1 Lagrange point, rather than in Earth orbit. Dust particles stay in the desired spot for approximately five days before dispersal by solar wind. So the idea is to use rail guns to launch a constant stream of dust from the Moon, keeping it replenished long enough to achieve the “desired” effect. Of course the resources required to build the infrastructure to establish and maintain such a capability would be massive.
If the approach were sustained indefinitely, or until other measures were introduced to remove carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere, this could offset the rise in carbon dioxide levels that has occurred since the industrial revolution…
Emphasis added.
Here’s my fear of the “antacid” approach put into words. If we can just keep spraying dust into space to cool the planet, we can just keep doing what we’re doing. I could see Koch money getting behind that.
Why not simply plant a lot more trees? Or stop building in swamps, so they can absorb carbon? Or paint the roof of every structure white?
Trees and whitewash?! Who’s going to watch a movie about planting and painting? Where’s the manly, heroic Big Engineering buzz in that? Killjoy!
Seriously, one could plant a lot of trees and paint a lot of roofs for the biliions to trillions of dollars such a scheme would take. I wonder if anyone’s done the math to calculate the temperature decrease that approach would produce? And, it would be better than than the one-size-fits-all shade the whole damn planet dust cloud exercise. And trees would actually extract CO2, reducing the amount already in the atmosphere. White rooftops aren’t going to be robbing anyone of sunlight. My guess is that the risk of unintended consequences for this approach is much lower than that of Operation Pigpen. Better still, all it takes are shovels and paint, and could be started tomorrow, instead of in years or decades, years or decades we can’t really afford. I say we direct a few billion (or trillion) dollars into Tigger’s Reforestry and Rooftop Albedo Augmentation Project (or TRRAAP-What’s an ambitious (even if low tech) geoengineering plan without an acronym?)!
I laughed at TRRAAP – I could even imagine it being said in the voice of the Disney cartoon Tigger!
None of that is an original idea of mine, just a culmination of all I have read on the subject as written by other people. As you say, it’s low-tech, cheap, we already have all the materials to hand, and every able-bodied human can do their part.
No heroes, no futuristic inventions, no loud noises (although I suppose they’d be quiet on the Moon).
I was just checking to see whether PZ had blogged about the sexual abuse allegations against Dan Muscato (do you really need a spoiler?) and saw this:
And ever since JK Rowling has demonstrated that she’s a revolting bigot. I’m not going to touch this game, let alone play it or review it.
This is what drives me crazy. We know PZ doesn’t believe that. We know that he’s pandering to what remains of his horde, for reasons that escape me entirely. I don’t even care about the why any more; HOW is a formerly principled man able to live with himself, lying like this?
I couldn’t, the guilt would eat me.
The last time I could bear to look at his blog through splayed fingers he still hadn’t written anything much about men in women’s sports. Just completely ignored the subject, as though it doesn’t exist. This, for me, was the final clinching proof that he doesn’t believe a word of what he says, any more. I haven’t seen him write a word about men in women’s prisons, either, although I can’t bring myself to pay much attention.
Hilariously, though, he wrote this very recently:
It turns out that progressive movements have a long history of informants blending in and disrupting the efforts of the group, and they’re usually men.
This is terrible. A young transgender woman was stabbed to death in the UK a few days ago- a heartbreaking tragedy.
Now extremist trans activists like Gretchen Felker-Martin are using this terrible event to advocate violence:
Blood on Jessie Singal’s hands, blood on Helen Joyce’s, Rowling’s, every just-asking-questions journalist and fear-mongering TERFs. You’re scared for your children? They’re killing ours….If they all had one throat, man.
Police are not currently treating it as a hate crime. But if they’re wrong and he was killed because he was trans, then I’ll be among the first to condemn it and count it among the verified stats of trans people being murdered for being trans. Wouldn’t everyone?
It throws the asymmetry between murders of men and women into sharp relief like nothing else.
I didn’t tweet about it at all because this is the murder of a teenager by (likely) other teenagers. The political discussions and implications should be about violence and probably not identity and the friends and family mourning seemed more important than either. But I had to change my mind when the inevitable happened and the gender people started saying the murder was blood on gender critical hands. I could accept such lies if nothing much were at stake. As it stands, I can’t.
We know that he’s pandering to what remains of his horde, for reasons that escape me entirely.
I don’t think it’s just the horde he’s pandering to. I think it’s also his fan base at his school. He’s already pretty much made himself public enemy #1 to the right wingers on campus; he can’t afford to piss off the woke.
Not too long ago I posted here about an opera singer, a woman who claims to be a man, who has a lovely and skilled soprano voice. I speculated that she wasn’t taking testosterone.
Today I came across this 2019 NYT article about transgender-identifying opera singers in general:
It addresses that point, saying that testosterone “lowers and alters the voice”, and that “Estrogen does not raise the voice the way testosterone lowers it”. One of the women profiled in the article went from mezzo-soprano to tenor; a male baritone, on the other hand, retained his baritone voice.
The baritone plays male roles in the opera; he’s “made peace with it”. Huh. A man pretending to be a woman pretending to pretend to be a man.
I just have to vent, I had a homework assignment on the COVID vaccine, and students (not all of them, not even most, but enough to enrage me) are taking it as a chance to make an anti-vax statement, which can be read by all the others. One even posted a link to infowars on the post of a student who stated there is no evidence of severe harm from the vaccine.
Kirsten Powers recounts how she was suckered into an evangelical movement that hid their donors and hid the real doctrine they were promoting.
Invariably, the people running seeker movements hide what they actually believe. They focus on the things that will draw people in, and that ironically ultimately play a tiny if not nonexistent role in informing their lives or how the church runs. Once the person is embedded in the community and totally bought into a specific version of Christianity, the real beliefs are casually mentioned like they’ve been saying this all along. It can make you feel like you are losing your mind. The nature of becoming involved in a church community like this is intimate — so there is lots of trauma bonding and vulnerability, such that by the time you realize that this is not for you, it feels almost impossible to leave.
This kind of approach seems almost too common these days, but among the parallels that come to my mind is transgender ideology activism. I think Powers does a good job explaining the tactics and the problems they cause.
Really liked Matt Yglesias post on the modern media landscape. This is really a “you need to read the whole thing” piece, but I’ll try to pull a few key points:
Efforts to explain this usually involve pointing out the media’s flaws. But fundamentally, “trust in media is declining because the media is bad” is a fallacious explanation — explaining a change over time requires a variable that has also been changing over time. And not only is there little evidence that the media has gotten worse since the high-trust, pre-Vietnam era, I think there’s considerable evidence that it’s gotten better.
As Louis Menand explains in a recent review essay, back in “the good old days,” the press was often willfully deceptive and saw collaborating with government officials to mislead people as part of its job.
…
One consequence of this increased competition is that it’s now much harder to manufacture consent. But even though coverage is better on the merits, flaws and mistakes don’t escape competitors’ notice, and every participant in the project has a strong incentive to exaggerate how bad “the media” is in order to sell their own wares. Fox News was patient zero for this, but it’s now ubiquitous. Bari Weiss isn’t going to launch the Free Press by saying “we’re going to pursue some stories and angles that I think are a little different from what most places are covering.” It’s much better for business to launch with a manifesto about how the press has abandoned its values. But that’s not really analysis — it’s marketing.
People have access to more and better information than ever before, so they’re more ambiently aware of bad stories than they used to be. After all, the point about covering up FDR’s disability is that it worked. If “the media” circa 1937 had been better, the truth would have come out and it would have made everyone involved look very bad. But because it was successfully covered up, everyone went on trusting.
…
Today, of course, there are no distinctions at all. The internet platforms that control online distribution can limit the reach of various stories if they want to, but the baseline case is that they don’t want to. A story that appears in any outlet can go viral. This has two critical implications. One is that you can’t actually stop a given piece of information from reaching people just by having “mainstream” outlets ignore it. The other is that because informational blockades don’t work, outlets are under strong competitive pressure to not ignore things, even if that is their inclination.
And last but not least, if you fuck something up there, are strong incentives for everyone else to publicize that fact.
…
None of this is to deny that plenty of bad stories run in the press, which raises the question of why.
After all, the purpose of journalism is to bring true information to light — so why are so many stories false and misleading, and why do so many true, important facts go under covered?
Here I’m afraid that the main problem is the news-reading audience, which simply does not agree that the purpose of journalism is to bring true information to light. I don’t know why people read what they read, but they are mostly not seeking actionable intelligence about the state of the world and therefore don’t care that much about accuracy.
Screechy M., I think the audience isn’t the variable here – there’s always been a mix of critical and credulous consumers of news. What’s changed is the medium. Instead of newspapers and three nightly news broadcasts on TV like we had during most of the 20th century, we now have the internet as the primary medium that provides news for more and more people, and as Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message”, or to put it more clearly, the medium is more important than the message itself. Twitter is the most prominent example of how the medium shapes discourse, and in particular allows for the propagation of half-baked bullshit at the speed of light across the world as well as enable a relative few true-believing activists to shape the message being sent.
So about “mainstream” outlets controlling news and such, what the internet is also allowing people to do is control their own consumption and bind themselves up into their own little cozy nutshells of thought. Historian Tony Judt in his last interview stated that he didn’t mind being cancelled by some of the media over his criticism of Israel, but that what bothered him was the closing of the Jewish mind to debate itself. We’re also seeing this in the ongoing row over transgender issues, with #nodebate being used to shut down discussion because, shut up that’s why.
So now as Twitter is having troubles under Elon I’m seeing those on the further left migrate to Mastodon, which is tailor made to silo people into their own little agreeable corners of social media and getting to have two-minute hate toots over J.K. Rowling practically daily. These aren’t stupid people though, they’re just committed to a side and thanks to highly motivated reasoning by god they’re going to stick to it. It’s ironic to say the least that so many skeptics from back twenty years ago now are doing their utmost to uphold the religion of gender identity.
Yglesias is someone I’ve read since the days of the blog Pandagon and he’s had an interesting career arc and is a clever thinker. He’s not, however, a very deep thinker and his take on the media is pretty superficial. It’s not the news audience that’s changed, it’s the medium that features TikTok as a major source of news for millions. Yes, newspapers weren’t perfect back then but the standards of traditional 20th century journalism were far, far better than what we have today online.
I think Yglesias’s point is not that the audience has changed. It’s that changes in technology have led to a proliferation of media sources, which has allowed more choice, which (while being in many respects a good thing) has allowed the audience to indulge its already-existing-but-heretofore-unsatisfied preferences for things other than merely accurate information, i.e. reinforcement of one’s views, outrage.
People weren’t nobler or better news consumers decades ago, they just didn’t have a wide range of options. Most people got their news from one of three national tv newscasts, one of at most two local newspapers, and perhaps a local radio station, and/or a national news magazine like Time or Newsweek. Because each of those outlets was competing for pretty much every consumer, they tended to all aim for a middle of the road approach, which frustrated some people but their only real option was to subscribe to Mother Jones or the National Review or read the local “alternative” newspaper to supplement their news diet.
Now local news is dying or dead, there’s a proliferation of national and international news and opinion sources which are happy to capture 10% of the audience, so they can specialize in ideological niches that get small but intense fan bases.
This seems like an extraordinary thing for a prominent barrister to say. As much because it’s very obviously nowhere near as plausibly deniable as he seems to think as because it really does seem to be condoning violent acts. I wonder if Maugham believes his own hype.
On another note, I was out of contact yesterday when Sturgeon resigned and my phone nearly melted with notifications when I turned it back on. I had that feeling unique to people living in these times; dread that I’d either said something really good or really, really bad.
Thanks, latsot. That’s almost unbelievable behaviour, like that of White.
I have to wonder why pro-MRA/TRA barristers seem so determined to go down with the ship. Their attachment to the fantasy seems to have made them think that they are untouchable, when – surely! – Sturgeon’s loss of position should have disabused them of that notion.
P.Z. Myers decides to challenge Tomas Bogardus over whether sex is a social construct or not. If childish insults are any indication, Myers lost the argument.
Funny that I linked a Matt Yglesias piece earlier this week, because now he’s gone one out on trans issues.
It’s pretty close to my own position, which I suspect will please few of the active participants in these debates (but is a pretty mainstream position — he has a talent for finding controversial “normie” takes on issues!) Yglesias already attracts a fair amount of hate among progressives, but I wonder if he’s ready for what’s about to be unleashed on him.
Democrats are in a bad place with respect to gender ideology, and Republicans are going to take advantage of it. Trans activists meanwhile will also slam any Democrat who dares to question trans dogma, and as Democrats need younger progressive voters who have bought into said gender ideology I don’t see how Democrats can do what Yglesias suggests in his piece. There’s a mainstream position to be sure, but politically it’s not viable I’m afraid,
Eh, I don’t buy this notion that Democratic politicians are totally captured by the activist left, on this or any other issue.
Certain activists also “slammed” any Democratic politician who didn’t endorse “defunding the police,” but that didn’t deter the overwhelming majority of Dems from backing away from that slogan because they correctly perceived that the public wasn’t with the activists on this one. It was the few politicians who went the other way who mostly ended up paying a political price, e.g. Mandela Barnes, who may have lost the WI-SEN race because some of his 2020-era statements made him vulnerable.
Today is the first day of hearing in the case of Tickle v Giggle, where @salltweets is being forced to defend her women only app from male predators like “Roxy Tickle”.
Fox News’s most prominent hosts and top executives agonized behind the scenes in the weeks following the 2020 election as they watched allies of Donald Trump appear on their own airwaves promoting false conspiracy theories about a stolen election, according to internal emails, text messages and depositions excerpted in a new court filing.
“Sidney Powell is lying,” Tucker Carlson wrote to a producer about the Trump lawyer, who once claimed in a guest spot that voting technology companies “flipped” Trump votes to Biden.
Even Rupert Murdoch knew that those claims were bullshit.
“Terrible stuff damaging everybody,” wrote company founder Rupert Murdoch, about wild claims raised by Powell and fellow Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani. The recipient of his note, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, agreed. In another message, Murdoch referred to the claims as “really crazy stuff” and said that it was “very hard to credibly claim foul everywhere.”
Hannity and Ingraham, too. But it was more important to pander to their idiot viewers.
Fox’s decision-desk analysts were days ahead of other news outlets in making the controversial call, which infuriated Trump and his supporters — including many Fox viewers.
“Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” Carlson wrote in a text message to his producer. “We’re playing with fire, for real.”
Scott, who forwarded Carlson’s concerns about the Arizona call to Fox Corp. CEO and executive chairman Lachlan Murdoch, was quoted as saying that Fox’s “brand” was impacted by the “arrogance” of the early — but accurate — call.
And now they’re crying “freedom of the press”.
“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” a spokesperson said, “but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.”
And hey, it might have been true.
In Fox’s own brief requesting the judge rule in its favor, attorneys argue that Fox showed no “actual malice” — the high standard required in defamation cases — because all of the hosts who allowed false claims to be aired honestly believed there was a chance the election might have been stolen using Dominion’s machines.
“It is hardly unusual that some people in a newsroom (with the diverse political viewpoints one would expect) will disbelieve the allegations and hope that they ultimately prove false,” Fox’s lawyers wrote, “while others will keep an open mind in hopes that they prove true.”
Although Hannity isn’t having it.
But Hannity, for one, said in a deposition quoted in the Dominion filing that he never believed Powell’s claims. “Nobody ever convinced me that their argument was anywhere near accurate or true.”
So much of PZ Myers’ response to Tomas Bogardus here is not even wrong:
3. Kaboom, there’s the stupid leap of illogic. Sex evolves, it changes rapidly, and social definitions of sexual behavior change frenetically. We humans do not possess a single genetic locus that cleanly defines sex — we have piled on all these complexities and elaborations that are still essential parts of sex, and many of them are entirely cultural. We are more than MATa or MATα. The idea that men should have short hair and wear pants, while women should have long hair and wear dresses, is entirely a social construct. You cannot simply declare that because yeast have a specific sexual identity that can be localized to a single gene, that therefore everything about human males and human females must therefore be fixed and unaffected by fleeting social mores.
“Sex evolves” is saying what? Not that the phenomenon of sex itself changes – there are still two of them enabling the recombination of genes. As far as complexities, like I suppose secondary sex characteristics, sexual behaviors involved with mating, raising of offspring, etc. go, they’re not really a part of sex itself, they’re things that have emerged from it. Then, saying that yeast having a sexual “identity” is ludicrous. Identity isn’t something yeast can think about, and trying to locate it to a single gene is just a silly assertion Myers seemingly thinks is being made by Bogardus. What Bogardus I believe is saying in step #3 is that the phenomenon of sex (and sexual reproduction) predates the notion of sex being a social construct. So what we may think about sex is one thing, but sex clearly exists outside the human conception of it. IMO, the claim “sex is a social construct” is just a sneaky way to support the claim that men can be women because what we think about sex is what defines sex. (That is what I believe philosophers call a category error, aka a real howler.) FWIW, I am neither a biologist or a philosopher, but I do my best to think critically anyway so feel free to chime in and help me out if you like.
The idea that men should have short hair and wear pants, while women should have long hair and wear dresses, is entirely a social construct.
He’s sounding an awful lot like a gender-critical feminist there. Hasn’t that been part of the feminist argument for, I dunno, forever? And yet when Bruce Jenner puts on makeup and a dress, the response isn’t “What a brave man!”, but “You look mahvelous, girl!”
So I had to fill out a firearms transfer form recently, and the sex section had three options. One would think that it would be in the national interest to gather accurate statistics regarding fucking weaponry that can kill people from a mile away, but maybe I’m just old fashioned.
I think conservatives are beginning to get what the difference is between “gender affirming” and “sex change” is and are passing legislation with that in mind.
JA, PZ has demonstrated for years that he is no longer capable of addressing sex as a concept without entangling it with social perceptions, except where the organism is not human. Mentions of sex when talking about his spiders or other non-humans, and he will happily speak of physical markers as proof of sex. Switch to humans, and suddenly it’s all sorts of po-mo ‘social perceptions are inextricably linked to the thing itself’ bullshit.
Raquel Evita Saraswati, a Muslim activist who for years has encouraged people to believe that she is a woman of color, including Latina as well as of South Asian and Arab descent, is the AFSC’s chief equity, inclusion, and culture officer, a senior position that gives her access to the files of dozens of the organization’s staff and volunteers. But Saraswati, who was born Rachel Elizabeth Seidel, is not a person of color, according to her mother, Carol Perone.
The article uses this case as a springboard to a brief discussion of problems in the diversity industry.
Holms, PZ has demonstrated for years that when he’s losing the argument his go to move is essentially “fuck you, that’s why”, followed by blocking the person he’s arguing with and then strawmanning them. It’s really quite unprofessional behavior, and would get him in real trouble outside the blogo/twittter sphere.
As for Bogardus, he’s continuing the argument sans PZ, and continuing to make good points with others who want to claim that sex is a social construct:
I believe this video is essential viewing. A gay man reads the Telegraph article about a new book, “Time to Think”, and the details of what has been going on in England are horrific.
The following is taken from legislation that just passed in the Minnesota House that would ban conversion therapy:
Conversion therapy does not include counseling, practice, or treatment that provides assistance to an individual undergoing gender transition, or counseling, practice, or treatment that provides acceptance, support, and understanding of an individual or facilitates an individual’s coping, social support, and identity exploration and development, including sexual-orientation-neutral interventions to prevent or address unlawful conduct or unsafe sexual practices, as long as the counseling, practice, or treatment does not seek to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
In other words, counseling or therapy where the mental health professional seeks to discover more about the basis of their patient’s beliefs by questioning them could be judged as unlawful under this legislation. So what this legislation is also doing is making gender-identity affirmation practically a requirement on the therapist’s part based on the patient’s initial statement stating what their gender identity is. If the patient is autistic and treating that could be construed as seeking to change their gender identity, that would also be unlawful. So what this legislation is doing under the cover of banning conversion therapy is making affirmation of gender identity the only kind of therapy that mental health professionals can provide.
Of course the existence of gender de-transitioners ought to be something that legislators should ask about and discuss/debate, and I hope for that to happen when the Minnesota Senate hears this bill. I would think there’s at least one Republican in the MN Senate who can bring that subject up, but gender critical thinking isn’t the GOPs strong suit given their culture war tendencies. Oh well.
Affirmation Generation, the documentary film, was put up on Vimeo but pulled shortly afterwards. It’s currently on The Distance, and I watched it and it is very good, very sad, and very necessary.
Forgive me for the personal anecdote, but an idea which has been floating around in my brain finally coalesced into words just now, and I realised that negative emotions – anger, sadness, frustration, bitterness, etc. – require a lot of energy for the brain to process, and so chronic low oxygen levels are actually helping me to be a calm, placid, content person, accepting of my current lot in life. As long as O₂ levels stay at 90% or above, no organ damage will occur, and, like a fœtus, I’ll just remain curled up and happy. Well, not quite – I still have to get up to get dressed, go to the bathroom, do the feline-related chores, etc. And, unlike a fœtus, I have access to the internet and a Nintendo Switch. And on Really Excellent Days*, when I actually have some energy, I get out and about and have fun just not being in bed, so that keeps me happy, too.
Carry on!
(*Good Day = A day where I wake up. Better Day = A day where I manage to visit the rest of the house. Really Excellent Day = A day when I manage to leave the house for something other than a doctor’s appointment. There are in-between states, but I won’t bore you with those)
I saw this in a meme shared publicly on Facebook, by someone who was not the author. I don’t know the author. I suspect it’s from Twitter.
I don’t know what
Marjorie Taylor Greene
has against drag queens.
She could learn a lot
about makeup and how
to act like a lady.
It’s not in the least important for MTG to learn to use makeup, nor how to act in a manner consistent with oppressive stereotypes of women. The very idea that MTG would improve in some manner by doing these things is sexist. The meme implies that these men are better “women” than MTG, and this is somehow an insult.
And drag queens are men. I don’t think all, or even many, claim to be women, except perhaps when doing their shows. Many have other lives, other names. They know they are not women, they are acting.
I really dislike defending MTG, but I think she’s in the right on this one thing, and I think the attack on her is an example of why.
Peter Goers is an Adelaide gadfly, scribbler, and broadcaster. He has a weekly column in a Murdoch paper and a daily radio show on the national broadcaster.
Some years ago, about the time of “Sing Along Sound of Music”, he caused a stir by declaring it the one movie where the audience cheers for the NAZIs to win.
Now, he has rewritten the much-loved Beatrix Potter’s “Tale of Peter Rabbit”. I commend it to all, and post in full as otherwise behind a paywall.
Cancel culture is dangerous. Nobody is perfect | Peter Goers
So-called “sensitivity readers” are a woke-up to the apparent political incorrectness of beloved children’s writer Roald Dahl.
With the permission of his literary executors, his work is being censored to conform with current woke values.
The shockingly offensive words “fat” and “ugly” (among others) are being excised from Dahl’s books and the famous Oompa Loompas are no longer men, but gender-neutral people.
What of style? What of humour? What of the author’s intentions? This is all sacrificed on the altar of woke and where does this stop?
Moby Dick is in big trouble. Them/they will be Moby Gender-Neutral Biological Genital Object. The Magic Pudding will soon be gluten-free. The Magic Faraway Tree will get closer. Noddy and Big Ears will actually be in a same-sex relationship.
So, I’ve rewritten Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit to make it politically correct and less offensive to young readers. I’ve updated it for contemporary resonance. I’ve made it relevant. Here goes….
Once upon a time there were four gender-neutral vegan beings who identified as rabbits. Their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter. They/them all chose not to wear pants. It was the choice of them/they and it was not imposed on them/they by any paternalistic authority figure.
They/them lived with they/their gender-expansive biological parent who chose to wear a dress which may or may not indicate they/their trans identity but they/them are highly sympathetic to trans identity.
They warned them not to go into the cisgendered, hetero-curious farmer MC Gregor’s garden because the garden is clearly a metaphor for imperialism, paternalism and capitalism. The gender-expansive biological parent then goes shopping. They are not materialistic, they just need food.
Peter was curious and went into the garden and ate some of the farmer’s organic, hormone and antibiotic-free lettuce, beans and parsley but no nuts as they have a nut allergy. Then they/them felt sick.
Then the cisgendered, hetero-curious farmer chased them out of the garden and they/them got lost.
Then they talked to a non-binary mouse (formerly fat but now completely comfortable with their size), a gender-queer cat and a sapiosexual goldfish.
Peter comes home and is very tired and takes his medications. The gender-expansive biological parent cooks a gluten-free, nut-free, vegan dinner.
Peter becomes gender-queer and changes their name to Rebel, Flopsy becomes cupiosexual, Mopsy becomes pansexual, the biological parent is transitioning, the mouse now lives in a non-conforming, sex-adverse relationship with the cat and the goldfish forgot everything and they all lived happily ever after.
Isn’t that an improvement on the quaint old tale/tail. It’s now modern and reassuring. Not that we are interested in labels. We just need to be fair and inclusive.
In the early 19th Century, Dr T. Bowdler censored Shakespeare to make his works more “family friendly”. The term bowdlerising applies to literary censorship which modifies for contemporary prurience. Bowdler lives.
Cinderella can no longer have a wicked stepmother or ugly sisters so there’s no point to that story. It has to go.
Language changes but history doesn’t. We can deplore the values of the past but not change them. They must be considered in context. That doesn’t correct the mistakes of the past but it helps us understand them. We can change the future. A children’s author now or in the future may chose not to use the words fat and ugly, and may encourage gender neutrality but by what right do we censor a dead author’s words?
Cancel culture is dangerous. Nobody is perfect. One day cancel culture will itself be cancelled. The TV show Woke was, indeed, cancelled. Ha!
Long live fat and ugly. There’s a lot of us. And we read.
Peter Goers has been a mainstay of the South Australian arts and media scene for decades. He is the host of The Evening Show on ABC Radio Adelaide and has been a Sunday Mail columnist since 1991.
“Moby Dick is in big trouble. Them/they will be Moby Gender-Neutral Biological Genital Object.”
reminds me that I saw a comedy clip recently in which the comic suggested that, in a “woke” version of Moby Dick, the whale would be non-binary and named Maybe Dick.
Wow, Twiliter, that’s quite amazing; and explains the weird Dilbert cartoon (with a red cat and the character in a KKK costume being told he’s fired) circulating on Facebook.
It is often said here that people are in favour of self-id laws up until the question is broken down into more detailed questions, e.g. ‘are you in favour of self-id if it permits untransitioned males entry to women’s changing rooms?’ – or however the wording is. I’m sure you know what I mean. Anyway, can anyone link to that please?
An absolutely dreadful article in “The Baffler” magazine has appeared, written by a Scott Branson.
It’s a long pseudo-leftist complaint about the “social order”, and “the family”, and the “anti-trans movement”.
the actual aim of the anti-trans movement..is about consolidating state control along the line of property rights. Gender is a form of discipline, the outcome of violence, both historical and contemporary, no matter the form it takes; we might even call normative parenting a form of grooming.
I’m sure many modern parents would have no problem with their children being gay, or bisexual, or being gender non-conforming; they merely want them to wait until they are of legal adult age before doing activities like having sex ( consensual, straight or gay) or dressing like, or medically transitioning to the opposite gender. Nothing to do with “state control” or “property rights”.
…look at the New York Times for their latest in a long line of surreptitious anti-trans opinion pieces, where “reasonable” critiques of transition are aired. Even when the editorial board was confronted by a group of contributing writers with a letter detailing the violent damage that their articles, which pose as objective while platforming anti-trans talking points, they simply responded with a defense of the notorious celebrity transphobe, J.K. Rowling, and a misleading conflation of the concerned writers with the media-monitoring group GLAAD. This lays the groundwork for anti-trans fascism.
“”Fascism”. You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means. ”
A newspaper publishing a few articles that disagree with Branson’s extremist views on the family, the state and transgender issues does not “lay the groundwork” for a violent ultra-nationalist political movement of any kind.
Poor, deluded, men who think that they can be turned into women.
Some of them come so close to understanding the objection to the mantra ‘TWAW’, but can’t quite manage to join the dots. Their narcissism gets in the way.
Liberation for gays, for women, will remain incomplete without ending the family form and the minoritization of children.
The problem with this claim is that children are not little adults. There are things they cannot comprehend about sexuality as they’re not able to experience it as adults do. That’s why we have so-called “age appropriate” sex ed in schools.
That said, I deeply distrust a movement that seeks to sexualize children for their own ends while speciously claiming it’s also for the good of gays and women. That kind of forced teaming is manipulative and dishonest.
Or should I say, having another go at obfuscating about sex somehow being bimodal. Myers must know he’s wrong about modality when it comes to sex, but is fully committed to lying about it anyway. It really is professional malfeasance on his part, being a professor of biology. If he’s teaching this in the classroom, he should be disciplined and told to cease misinforming his students.
I know that there is a range of sexual states, and that individuals can shift their position on the continuum.
So sex is a spectrum and people can literally change sex. Presumably by changing their outfits and hairstyles and announcing new pronouns. Madness.
I hadn’t paid attention to Myers in a long time. I knew he supported gender woo but I honestly didn’t expect his supposedly scientific position on the nature of biological sex to be this explicitly crazy.
I saw this essay by a detransitioner on the Advocates Protecting Children web site. It’s short and personal, and it speaks to the nonsense and fragility and cognitive dissonance inherent in gender ideology. I liked it a great deal.
While Myers is wrong about there being more than two sexes, I think his interlocutor is wrong about modality. He seems to be claiming that categorical variables can’t be bimodal, but that’s not the case. Take party affiliation of politicians in the US—there are several categories (independent, socialist, communist, etc.), but nearly every politician is either R or D. If that’s not bimodal, then I don’t know what that term means. (In fact, I think you could even argue that a binary can be bimodal, if membership in the two categories is roughly equal.)
My apologies for being a bit late. Being sick, I lost track of time. All six episodes of the first series of Unsafe Space from BBC Radio Four are available here:
The format isn’t entirely to my liking (a mix of comedy sketches and short interviews, often with annoying and distracting background noise) and nor is a lot of the comedy, but some of it is hilarious (to me, you might find different joke amusing to the ones I laughed at).
What is really interesting, though, are the interviews of people on either side of an issue, especially the ‘trans’ debate. In each episode, the interviewer asks pointed and provocative questions, the ones we wish other journalists were brave enough to ask, and the interviewees on our side (such as Graham Linehan) manage to give sensible, grown-up, coherent responses. Those on the other side manage to make themselves sound utterly bonkers. They appear to be so sure that their mantra-filled, counter-factual beliefs are justified entirely by the passion with which they hold them, they entirely fail to take into account the context. Well worth a listen, although perhaps through headphones if you don’t wish to annoy other people.
Dear god, PZ is on a tear lately. Is the guy determined to embarrass himself? Remember, the little run of recent tweeting has been about whether there are 2 sexes or some other number, as seen here in #288 and 289.
In this blog post, he disputes the 2 sex idea with the following.
I understand that making an embryo requires a fusion of two gametes.
Oh. Actually, that’s better than I expected from him, I was dreading some gigantic wall of text that in no way disputes or even addresses the 2 sex idea.
…
Oh. My god. I spoke too soon-
I also know the logical difference between the fact that many females make eggs, and the idea that all females must make eggs. I also know that even in spiders there’s more to sex than tab A goes into slot B.
I also have information on that. I’m mainly interested in spider sex as a means to an end — I need lots of embryos — but to get there I’ve been making observations of spider behavior. Every morning I move a male spider into a container with a female spider, slide it under a dissecting scope, and watch what happens. Sometimes courtship and mating are swift and dramatic, and I click a button and record the whole process, and that’s what you see. Sometimes they take their time, and I have to watch them dawdle and fumble around for a half hour before anything happens. Sometimes I give up and put the pair in an incubator overnight and hope something happens. Rarely, the female just murders and cannibalizes the male. Of the clutch of spiders that emerged in January, I’ve got 11 females who successfully mated and produced an egg sac; I’ve got 16 that spurned the male I provided and are effectively childless. Those I don’t record, because two wallflower spiders avoiding each other isn’t particularly interesting.
What’s going on? I don’t know. My focus isn’t on the behavior, but on the development of embryos. But who knows — maybe there are gay and lesbian spiders. Maybe some are asexual. Maybe there are timid spiders and bold spiders. Maybe some spiders are unattractive and no one wants to have sex with them. Maybe the Adult Spider Female is focused on her bug-munching career, and doesn’t want to make babies. Maybe some pairs of spiders have cellular incompatibilities that prevent fertilization. Maybe for some spiders the behavior works, but the plumbing is atypical. These are all interesting possibilities, and if a student were to come along and ask to make a quantitative analysis of mating behavior and reproductive success, I think there are a lot of good questions to ask and some useful studies to make, because sex, even in a small arthropod as driven by instinct as a spider, isn’t binary, isn’t a question of did they or didn’t they, and exhibits a range of complex variation that I haven’t tried to plumb.
Look at how little relevance this has to the question of whether there are two sexes. That last paragraph flails about with particular vigour, as he runs through a list of complexities as if to impress the reader with how fraught it all is. He touches on spider sexuality (not at issue), libido (not at issue), socialisation (not at issue), infertility (not at issue), and genital malformation (not at issue). Yet after entirely dodging the question at hand he has the cheek to declare that he has prevailed: “because sex, even in a small arthropod as driven by instinct as a spider, isn’t binary”. Case closed.
Except that’s only about half of the post! There is a bit more dreary question-dodging, including a convenient list of physical parameters that do not bear on the issue (“Receptivity, courtship initiation, web twanging frequency, successful insemination frequency, dancing intensity, abdomen size, interval since last courtship, metabolism levels…”). Still nothing to dispute that there are two sexes.
Oh and of course the whole thing is adorned with snide asides and petty insults. He finishes with something he seems to think is a logical trap:
But if humans can’t change sex, why is this crowd so opposed to gender affirming care, hormonal treatments, and surgery? If sex is an unstoppable freight train that can’t be diverted, then let them continue with their ineffectual efforts to change sex. Except that they keep seeing the inescapable evidence that sex can and does change.
Ahem. Setting aside the differences in how we frame ‘gender affirming care’, we aren’t opposed to it in adults, though I for one am not in favour of it being funded through government health care. We are opposed to it in minors*. And as sex can’t be changed, we are also against the availability of a legal process by which people can coopt the courts into pretending it can be.
*I know, this is where the TRA yells that nothing is done to minors except harmless and wholly reversible puberty blocking (despite it not being without side-effect and not being reversible), but this just isn’t true. Hospitals do perform irreversible surgeries on adolescents (1,2 just as an appetiser – there is more reporting of this out there), yet even if this was not the case, trans-promoting organisations are campaigning to bring this about!
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) today announced its updated Standards of Care and Ethical Guidelines for health professionals. Among the updates is a new suggestion to lift the age restriction for youth seeking gender-affirming surgical treatment, in comparison to previous suggestion of surgery at 17 or older.
…
“Lifting the age restriction will greatly increase access to care for transgender adolescents, but will also result in the need for parental consent for surgeries before doctors would likely perform them”
Surgeries on minors are already happening, and they’re pushing for more to take place.
Thank you for that, Holms. As you point out, he is being devious and dishonest. Nobody is calling all the other stuff around sexual reproduction ‘sex’, so that’s a complete red herring.
Perhaps he would like a refresher course in logical argumentation? The point of football is to have two teams play against one another, until one team wins or the game runs out of time. Even given the fact that there are referees, spectators, different tactics in play, some matches are played on fields and others in stadia, some are televised, although most are not, etc., teams don’t wear the same colours, etc. nobody would conclude that the game is complicated so cannot be said to be played by two teams.
Kevin Drum doesn’t understand the genderism issue, but he has some cogent things to say about things like social media and the “woke” viewpoint. Here he presents and comments on a good column by Matt Yglesias:
There are certain words that are deliberately designed to force action from HR, and the entire spectrum of harm words are among them. In particular, if you say you feel unsafe, that’s basically a code word demanding that HR take action or risk legal trouble.
Not everyone understands this, but the people wielding this language do. That’s why it should be used only when someone genuinely feels unsafe: they’re being sexually harassed, for example, or their family has been threatened. But in cases of simple personal offense or disagreement, it’s a malicious escalation deliberately meant to get someone in serious trouble—or even fired. Anyone who does this without serious cause should be treated as the asshole they are.
Yes, exactly. Code words intended to get other people to take action, not expressions of genuine concern.
The Kellie Jay video is much too much for me to watch at one sitting, the stories told by the brave women right from the beginning are heartbreaking.
So I have cheered myself up by watching Barry Wall enjoy the latest news from the loopier men who claim not to be men. There’s some really good news in there, namely that Titzilla is now on leave.
I’m in Minnesota and I’m a Democrat, and I feel kind of steamrollered right now. We have a Democrat Trifecta, with the state House, the State Senate, and the governor. And they are doing many great things that have needed to be done for many years, and we’re getting caught up.
CNBC is framing this as a human rights violation rather than good sense. Why hire somebody who’s insisting on special treatment based on nothing more than narcissism?
Seafolly is a well established Australian swimwear brand, founded in Sydney over 40 years ago. It has had many “brand ambassadors” over they years, but until now, never a “Trans Ambassador”.
Seafolly has announced Deni Todorovič as its first trans ambassador.
“This week I’ve been reminded of the many complexities of living as a trans non binary person in Australia, so to have this support from a brand I’ve admired since my days at Cosmo — is a true pinch me moment,” they wrote.
Trans. Non Binary. They. Look at the photos, no doubt at all Deni’s a bloke. Sock in jocks. Manspreading. Bearded. Hirsute.
Never mind bespoke pronouns and cultish thinking dividing us all. I think that this little bit from Sir Ian McKellan is the perfect way people should talk to one another. No more broken men, no more women sacrificing their own safety and peace of mind trying to pick up the pieces. Just a world where everyone addresses everyone else as ‘love’.
The web site is real. Jeremy Boreing is a co-founder of Daily Wire. They have a commercial about their razor products that might also be of interest. They are thumbing their noses at companies that dropped ads from Daily Wire over “values misalignment”. The “I hate …” URLs redirect to jeremysrazors.com, where you can see the commercials, various products, and other information.
Yes, it’s real. I put up screenshots of the site on Facebook, in the comments of a post I made with the video. The whole ordering page is brilliant; but, much as I’d like to, I can’t justify spending so much money on chocolate which probably couldn’t be sent to me, and which I couldn’t eat even if it did arrive.
Just came across this review of the book After Sappho in today’s print version of the Washington Post*. Nice to see that the reviewer doesn’t shy away from the w- word, but nowhere does he use the l- word, instead referring to “queer women”**. Kind of ironic in a review of a book named after the original Lesbian.
*A pet peeve as a longtime subscriber and lifelong fan of print newspapers: I hate reading an article in the paper only to find that it was published days earlier online. Yes, I’m a dinosaur.
[…] Via What a Maroon I read a review by Jacob Brogan of a novel about lesbians which (as WaM noted) doesn’t use the word “lesbian” once. The word “queer” on the other hand appears nine times. I get that the word “queer” has been, according to some people, reclaimed or repurposed or seized or whatever you want to call it. There’s a parallel, I think, to the way the word “Negro” went out of favor to be replaced by its English language equivalent, “Black.” It was a move from the weirdly euphemistic to the blunt, because what the hell was there to be euphemistic about anyway? “Negro” came to seem tellingly squeamish. There’s also of course a parallel to the reclaiming (or claiming) of “dyke,” helped along by Alison Bechdel. […]
It’s hard, I realise, to discern the actual message of radical feminism when the loudest voices are those opposed to it; this is almost certainly why this young woman (who seems to hold views uncannily close to the ones I held at her age) has spent such a lot of effort on objections to the strawman version. There are a few phrases which suggest that somewhere in the back of her mind something is prodding her to consider the possibility that she’s attacking a strawman, but her certainty keeps re-asserting itself. She’ll learn that there’s a reason that it is “crabby, disagreeable old radical feminists who have stuck to their guns” on the transgender issue; when you realise that you’ve been kept away from supporting radical feminism by a curtain of stereotypes and lies, and that it’s a movement based on class analysis and not the hatred of individuals because of who they are (as you have been misinformed your whole life), it’s logical to become crabby and disagreeable.
It has really brought into relief the underlying assumptions we often make here at B&W; that we debate ideas on their merits, and not give weight either way to them according to who is expressing them. I have been opposed to many of the expressed beliefs of Anne Widdecombe and Katie Hopkins; and have, in the past, considered them to be not very nice women precisely because of their expressed beliefs – when I should, of course, have restricted myself to criticising those beliefs and not imputing any bad character as I know neither of them. Anne Widdecombe in particular is a hard woman to pin down, because I have found my rational brain agreeing with her at times when my instincts are insisting that ‘she’s a horrible person, so why am I even listening to her’? Gut feelings are our most important instincts in so many situations, but not in rational debate.
Here both she and Katie Hopkins advance rational, reasonable, and well-supported arguments in favour of NOT ‘no-platforming’ anyone, while the oppositions points are either very naïve or completely at a tangent (Robert French’s speech seems to be supporting an entirely different motion, ‘Both sides agree’).
Kellie Jay is utterly right to say that just because we may disagree vehemently with someone else’s views on various political and social issues, that is no reason to shun them when they agree to support us on others. I doubt I agree on everything with anyone; no-one would have any friends if that were their standard for others to meet.
WaPo hit piece on the “Witch Trials” podcast. Attacks on women speaking are perfectly justified because the women didn’t include men who claim to be women.
There’s a documentary about Bill Cosby currently airing on the BBC. In it, a “non-binary sex therapist” says that the problem wasn’t that Cosby is a rapist, the problem is “sex negativity”. In a “sex positive” world, she says, Cosby could have paid women to be drugged into unconsciousness so he could rape them “consensually”.
I will say again that this was aired on the BBC.
Please consider complaining about this if you can.
This is your brain on queer theory. This is what queer theory deems not only acceptable, but ‘sex positive’.
We live in the age of identity politics and identity fraud. Identity is now all about one’s visible race, religion/ethnicity and gender, not about one’s work, ideas, or opinions.
This week’s Blocked and Reported features a segment on the Unicorn Ranch which seems to be the source of all those pics of TIMs with pink assault rifles if anyone’s interested (it’s a shit show).
A poitician has been underfunding vital services to deflect the money into ‘LGBTQ+’ ‘projects’. This is infuriating, and by ‘LGBTQ+’ I think they mean ‘T’, and possibly ‘Q+’ in as far as those fall under the ‘T’:
Detransitioners Michelle, Laura, Cat, David, Joel and Abel tell the stories of their gender distress, transgender medicalization, and subsequent detransition. Without diagnostic clarity or mental health evaluations, their doctors quickly affirmed them as “transgender,” and mindlessly ushered them along the path of medical transition. (The “gender-affirming care” is the only treatment recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.) These young people were harmed irrevocably by the doctors they trusted. AFFIRMATION GENERATION demonstrates how the “one-size-fits-all” medicalization – the “gender-affirming care” – has failed these patients.
The stories of the detransitioners are examined by twelve leading experts with decades of clinical practice treating gender-distressed patients: psychotherapists Lisa Marchiano, Sasha Ayad, Stella O’Malley, physician-scientist Lisa Littman, endocrinologist Dr. William Malone, MD; Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist Stephanie Winn, sociologist Dr. Michael Biggs, pediatrician Dr. Julia Mason, NYT best-selling writer Lisa Selin Davis, and LGB activist & lifelong Liberal Democrat Joey Brite, among others. The 90-minute documentary cites 45 peer-reviewed medical and journalist articles.
I saw that the other day and watched it about six more times. I love it. I especially love the way the first elephant trumpets when the truck tries to sneak away without stopping. “STOP, let me grab my couple of sugar canes, THEN you can go.”
I saw that Michelle Yeoh is the first actress who “identifies as” Asian to win the Oscar for best actress. Seeing the phrase reminded me about a few years back, when I first became aware of the concept of “identify as” but before the trans juggernaut was in full force. I was debating internally how I might “identify”. One of the rules I think I unconsciously applied was that one could only “identify as” some ethnic category if one actually had some factual basis for that identity. For example, Tiger Woods, who is of Thai, Chinese, Black, White, and Native American background, could legitimately “identify as” any or any combination of those things, it was a matter of personal choice of emphasis, not of fabrication. Now, of course, “identify as” has become more important than mundane facts about people, and sometimes (often) facts don’t matter at all. So is it more important that Yeoh embraces her Asian ancestry, or that she is, as simple point of fact, actually of Asian ancestry?
This story came across my news feed yesterday. After a quick recap of the “anti-trans rights” litany (banning hormones and surgeries for kids! restricting drag shows!), we get into the main story, about a TiM being “verbally assaulted” while livestreaming his lunch with his dog at a Cheesecake Factory. To be clear, no one should be verbally assaulted by a stranger while eating lunch with their dog, not even at a Cheesecake Factory, but still, the story raises some questions.
First, the news story doesn’t show the whole interaction; for that, you’d need to go to TikTok (and I don’t go there). But apparently the “verbal assault” consisted of making jokes, calling him “son” (misgendering, doncha know), asking if he’d like to see the scars on her stomach, and saying she “hits hard”. Sounds pretty annoying. She also identifies herself as a “TERF”. So our hero called over the manager (no Karen he) and got an apology.
But it’s all very odd. First, why is he livestreaming at a Cheesecake Factory? Is that normal? And what’s that business about her scars? Why would she want to show it? When she talks about “hitting hard”, does she mean physically or verbally (as in “hard-hitting journalism”)? And who identifies herself as a TERF?
More broadly, would KPIX show video of gender-critical feminists getting attacked, and characterize it as anti-GC hate?
And most disturbing of all, the Cheesecake Factory allows dogs to sit on their seats?
Anyway, you’ll be glad to know that “Lily” stayed amazingly calm and polite throughout the whole ordeal (almost as if she was expecting it), and, most importantly, she’s gained thousands of followers.
Tiger Woods used to call himself “Cablasian” (a portmanteau of all his different ethnicities).
Karen Attiah had a column about what she calls “the racial imposter problem”, and she makes some interesting points. For example:
Fundamentally, one reason White women can even think to do this is that non-White cultures, physical features and clothing styles are frequently seen as ripe for appropriation, things to be tried on and discarded as if they were costumes on sale at Party City.
In light of that, I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn that Karen Attiah toes the trans-ideology line.
That was an interesting column. I disagree with a lot of it, but the arguments were illuminating.
I think where my thoughts were, in reference to “things to be tried on and discarded”, is that my unconscious rule was that things could be discarded but not tried on. That is, I can envision people saying, “Yeah, I’m part Bolivian, but I don’t identify as Bolivian”, and having that kind of sentiment found acceptable. And if a movie is seeking Bolivian representation, they can’t just hire someone who actually is of Bolivian background, it must be someone who (additionally) claims Bolivian as part of his or her identity.
If how someone identifies becomes so much more important than the facts of their ancestry, it doesn’t seem too huge a step to say that the facts of their ancestry are actually irrelevant. But that doesn’t happen; one can only identify as some subset of one’s actual ancestry. Why reality matters in this “identify as” form but not in trans ideology remains unclear.
Yeah, it’s a complicated situation–ethnicity is some mix of ancestry and geography (“Asian” only makes sense as an identity outside of Asia), and some mix of external criteria and internal feeling. And some identities may be easier to take on than others. Alberto Fujimori could legitimately claim to be Peruvian, but my wife’s cousin who was born and grew up in Vienna to Spanish parents can’t get Austrian nationality.
One would certainly think that sex is more clear cut–it’s a category with two values, and with vanishingly few exceptions everyone is one or the other. But perhaps it comes down to ancestry–after all, we’re all equally descended from males and females, so perhaps we do get to choose..
Video by The Famous Artist Birdy Rose about threats against Shumirun Nessa over her criticism of groomer Jeffrey Marsh. Great video. I’m pretty furious about the situation.
This should be easy, right? A sport which depends entirely on strength should be strictly segregated by sex. Or perhaps you could accommodate trans people by creating a third category for people calling themselves trans and “non-binary”, as USA Powerlifting tried to do. Seems like a reasonable compromise.
But of course a TIM disagrees, and he found a judge to agree with him. The judge’s opinion is, well, something.
“Segregation and separation are the hallmarks of discrimination,” Minnesota District Judge Patrick Diamond wrote in a Feb. 27 decision. “Separate but equal is unavailing. Discrimination claims are not defeated because separate services, facilities, accommodations were made available.”
If that’s the case, why have separate women’s sports at all? Shouldn’t everyone just compete in one league? I mean, we don’t allow segregated schools anymore.
Most of the rest of the judge’s opinion is the same old boring arguments (inclusion, fairness, etc.), but at least the article itself is fairly well-balanced in presenting the other side of the issue.
And while I don’t condone corporal punishment, and never practiced it on my kids, I got a chuckle out of this (Larry Maile is the president of US Powerlifting; JayCee Cooper is the trans-identified male who sued) (my bolding):
Maile resisted, though, and apparently became frustrated with the repeated efforts by Cooper and her [sic] supporters to challenge USA Powerlifting’s policies, writing in one email that “someone did not get beaten enough as a child. These people were children screaming in Walmart and their parents did nothing. Now they are adults and still screaming.”
The organization fights on.
The case is scheduled to proceed to a trial on damages in May. Maile said the organization is willing to take the case to the Minnesota Supreme Court, if necessary. Legal costs are mounting, but for USA Powerlifting, Maile said the outcome of the case is a matter of survival.
“When you consider the rights of all of our various constituencies, it may be the hill we die on,” he said. “So we will continue because we believe that we’re right in terms of what ultimately are the differences and what constitutes fairness — not in all sports and not out there in society but what constitutes fairness on our platform.”
Interesting article about a strong feminist movement in South Korea–4B is an attempt to cut off all relationships with men. (The 4B moniker refers to four different elements of heterosexual relationships–marriage, childbirth, dating and sex.) Sadly, the article has the usual tarnish from the usual source:
Some 4B practitioners also were turned off by the movement’s focus on cisgender women to the exclusion of trans women; many of the online communities require verification with a photo ID attesting to the applicant’s sex, and Minji said that one of the feminist communities she joined asked her to submit a video of her Adam’s apple, ostensibly to ensure she wasn’t assigned male at birth. But regardless of where they stand on these questions, for the more than a dozen 4B practitioners I met in Korea, these were academic disagreements that had little impact on their own personal commitment to living apart from men.
But that’s the only sidetracking in a fairly long and thoughtful article. Definitely worth a read.
In a sleight of hand, it is not transphobia that threatens the rights of the trans community, but those who oppose transphobia who are threatening women (understood as a monolithic group, in which only the experiences and expectations of middle-class white women matter).
What planet are these real-life Dave Spart types on? Have they never heard of Allison Bailey, Raquel Rosario Sánchez or Jana Cornel ?
This piece is getting very widely retweeted. Maybe us at B&W should take its logical fallacies and factual errors apart?
Attended the Let Women Speak event in Adelaide, and wouldn’t ya know it, the TRA opposition did not want to let women be heard. Attendance of our team was in the 50-70 range, though my view was bad as I was on low ground. The misogyny brigade had up to 100 people, virtually all under 25 and doing their best to silence women speaking for women’s rights. Because they’re on the right side of history, apparently.
But I managed to hear most of what was said, and was struck by the bravery of those that spoke in front of a baying mob. Such a striking difference to the two groups.
I think I saw a certain Reverend lurking in almost the exact opposite part of the crowd from me too!
I’ve had a moment just now, and realized that transgender health care is also fetish nourishment. I know, late to the party and all that, but there it is.
The article describes the new law accurately, I think:
Tennessee’s new law criminalizing public drag performances goes into effect April 1. The law, which refers to “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest,” makes it an offense for a person to engage in an adult cabaret performance on public property — or in a location where the performance could be viewed by children.
What the interviewee says about the law:
“The idea that they think that every drag performer is doing something hypersexual or obscene obviously means they don’t know very much about it,” DuBalle says. “I cannot succinctly put into words what the entire art of drag is, and the fact that these legislators who know far less about the art than I do and have never been to a drag show are sitting out there making these laws — that’s a little upsetting.”
Somehow I don’t see how he reads a ban on sexualized performances in public or in front of children and manages to interpret that as saying all drag performances are sexualized. I mean, I’ve heard some drag performers say that’s the case most of the time, but the law certainly doesn’t imply that. I linked to the signed bill above, it’s pretty short.
The only criticism I have for the law is that it only limits ‘adult cabaret performances’ if the people involved are in drag. If the bill author and sponsors want to eliminate sexualised performances from public, why include that limitation? This makes it clear that it is a shot at drag more so than anything else.
“Adult cabaret performance” means a performance in a location other than an adult cabaret that features topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest, or similar entertainers, regardless of whether or not performed for consideration
Drag is implied under “male or female impersonators”, certainly, but that’s only one of the categories. I suppose there are other manners of prurient entertainment not specified, but I think their definition is pretty comprehensive and not limited to drag.
Given the whole point of starting the drag queen story hour campaign was to normalize drag as an overtly sexual performance, I don’t have much sympathy for drag performers here. If they still want to do drag and read to kids, they can do it dressed like, you know, a normal person instead of doing outrageous womanface with fake tits and revealing tights. I once wrote a city ordinance that regulated adult entertainment businesses and the Tennessee law is basically doing that and isn’t discriminating against drag in particular.
The point of laws like this TN one is to intimidate people and chill expression, and this very thread demonstrates how.
Oh, the law doesn’t specifically say that all drag performances are illegal, only ones that appeal to a prurient interest! And who could be against performances of a prurient interest where CHILDREN might see it? (Won’t somebody think of the children?)
Except what makes something an “appeal to a prurient interest”? Yes, it’s a phrase used in obscenity law, so it has some legal meaning, but obscenity has other requirements that limit its applicability, and even with those it’s still a bit of a dangerously fuzzy concept.
And here in this very thread we have J.A. expressing the view that drag performances are de facto appeals to prurient interest.
Imagine trying to advise a client on what they can and can’t do in TN. Can you perform a stage version of Mrs. Doubtfire? Well, the Robin Williams version didn’t seem terribly sexy, so probably? But maybe not. Maybe it depends on the size of the fake breasts. But hey, you probably wouldn’t be convicted. I mean, you might be arrested and lose your job and not be able to pay rent or mortgage while you await your trial, and end up owing huge amounts of attorneys fees, but you’ll probably be acquitted, right? Sound like a risk you’d like to run?
It’s the same with some of the laws being passed in Florida. Oh, gosh, the law doesn’t say you can’t have books about Rosa Parks in schools! I mean, a teacher wouldn’t be convicted for having such a book in their classroom library. Well, almost certainly not. They probably wouldn’t even be charged. I mean, what are the chances of some conservative parent making a stink, and some crusading and/or politically ambitious D.A. deciding to press charges? That would never happen in the great state of Florida! Well, ok, it might. But probably not! That sounds like something worth risking your career, financial security, and freedom for!
It’s just not the same thing as a banning a book about Rosa Parks. As for showing films like Mrs Doubtfire and Tootsie, let’s just say that they’re not showing men aping sexy poses while pretending to be women reading stories to kids. You don’t have to trust me on this, but you might want to ask yourself why drag queen story hours came to be in the first place. Hint: cut bono?
While the hateful cowboys and coalmongerers in Wyoming are banning the distribution and administration of mifepristone, the North Dakota Supreme Court (all Republicans, btw) has determined that because the North Dakota law does not allow abortions to save the life of the mother, nor protect her health, it is unconstitutional on the grounds that it deprives women of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Moreover they noted that an 1887 law from territorial Dakota guarantees the right to an abortion establishing long precedence.
What a Maroon@359: Wierdly enough, I think it DOES mean them in that order. The idea is that each of the four “B”s is an aspect of heterosexual relationships that, in S. Korean culture, put women at risk, and thus, should be avoided. The order is a progression of having less and less involvement with men.
Deciding “I never want to get married” is thus first, as it’s arguably something that would invariably involve the other three. Then, “I never want to have a child” (an unwed woman could still give birth, albeit in a manner considered very shameful, though possibly not as shameful, weirdly, as childless spinsterhood). Not dating means not spending time with men outside the bedroom in any fashion, and then finally, ruling out even casual hook-ups with men completes the non-interaction (and thus, becoming either celibate or political lesbians, which was a term used in the article).
I’d certainly encourage a similar movement in any US state that passes laws against abortion, birth control and so on.
Ah, that makes sense. I was thinking of the order in which those events typically take place, not the order in which women swear off them.
an unwed woman could still give birth, albeit in a manner considered very shameful, though possibly not as shameful, weirdly, as childless spinsterhood
That’s one of the clearest examples of patriarchy I’ve seen. Women are valued first as vessels for childbirth, second as property.
PZ has a post today laughing at young Earth creationists struggling to understand stem cell and genetics developments. Have at it, they deserve to be laughed at. But I found it interesting to see evidence, as usual, that PZ knows perfectly well what certain English words mean…
“Biologists have managed to reprogram stem cells taken from a male mouse into female oocytes, then fertilized them with sperm from another male mouse, and produced healthy offspring — that is, they’ve made mice with two fathers.”
‘Father’ used when referring to male parents.
“It’s only been done in mice, and it’s a long, long way to being repeatable in humans, but this is exactly the procedure two gay men could use to have children together.”
‘Men’ used when referring to male people.
The commenters, people who happily muddle sex with gender whenever the context involves trans people, also follow this trend.
“The DNA came from two male mice. Therefore, the mice have two daddies. So simple a child could understand it, but not a creationist.”
Nor a trans activist. This burst of rationality only occurred because they don’t have the trans activist hat on for the moment.
I’m beginning to think fruitful conversation is actually an extreme rarity. I was just butting my head against someone who apparently believes that this:
If p, then not-p
If not-p, then p
isn’t a contradiction, but instead means that p is constantly changing from true to false and back. Like the truth value is p is in some state of quantum indeterminacy. As though logical statements work like computer code in a while loop.
while (true) {
if (p == true) { p = false; };
if (p != true) { p = true; }
};
For real, though. How can we convince someone that a belief is wrong when they reject basic logic?
I am glad that CFI, possibly alone among the major atheistic organizations in the US, appears not to be captured by gender woo. Richard Dawkins is still involved despite statements like his recent assertion that there are two sexes. News elsewhere incorrectly reported that Dawkins said there were two genders, but I liked this brief item in CFI’s “Morning Heresy” news roundup:
Richard Dawkins appeared earlier this week for an interview on Piers Morgan Uncensored. The wide-ranging interview covered questions about evolution, atheism, free speech on campus, and Dawkins’ oft-stated (and scientifically accurate) distinction between “biological sex” and “gender.” (Transcript via Talk.tv)
Piers: What’s the answer?
Richard: Science. There are two sexes. You could talk about gender, if you wish and that’s a subjective.
Piers: But when people say there are 100 genders?
Richard: I’m not interested in that. As as a biologist, there are two sexes and that’s all there is to it.
Well the thing is Dawkins isn’t so much still involved as still in the driver’s seat. Robyn Blumner is the President and CEO. Dawkins isn’t going anywhere.
I saw the Piers Morgan clip the other day. I disagree with Dawkins on some things but not that one!
The ACT government is preparing legislation to outlaw surgery on people with DSDs until they are able to consent. I found a few comments from Intersex people quite enlightening.
One advocate, Steph Lum, said they are proud of the body they were born with.
“Our bodies don’t need to be forcibly changed,” they said.
Well, looks like that puts them at odds with the *T* part of the Alphabet Soup who seem to be on a never-ending path of surgery and chemicals to forcibly change their bodies.
Equality Australia tweeted
After decades of advocacy by intersex people, the ACT Government has just introduced Australia’s first laws to protect intersex people from unnecessary medical interventions without their consent.
Now, if they could just apply that same logic to unnecessary medical interventions for children.
This is an interesting essay by Will Lloyd on the writer and early “transgender pioneer” Jan Morris.
It’s interesting to see how Morris went from a stereotypical “man” to an equally stereotypical “woman.”
It also points out that back in the 1970s, women who disagreed with gender self-identification were free to do so openly (look at those Rebecca West and Nora Ephron quotes):
https://unherd.com/2022/10/the-prophet-of-our-gender-troubles/
The issue of BBC neutrality reaches Australia’s equivalent, the ABC. The ABC’s own program Media Watch discusses the issue with great clarity. I discovered Australia has its own ‘Stonewall champions’ program, or something very similar… and that ABC is very much in bed with it.
The commentary is generally quite good, pointing out that the organisation offers ‘diversity points’ or whatever for editorial choices made in favour of trans people; unfortunately it also contains a stumble by calling an organisation critical of this arrangement ‘anti-trans’; I saw no such animosity when I went looking.
Ephron’s review of Morris’s book is in Crazy Salad. It’s a joy to read.
A gyne/ob writes a letter in response to a Russ Douthat column, telling us that People denied an abortion suffer financially and health wise. I’m sure if I asked for an abortion I’d be denied, even here in Minnesota. But I’m not one of the generic people she’s referring to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/opinion/letters/abortion-women.html
There’s an interesting review of the Jan Morris biography in the Times.
Holms beat me to the Media Watch item which was excellent and calmly presented.
Here is another very good panel discussion from our other National broadcaster, SBS, featuring some excellent contributions, including Sall Grover of Giggle (@sallwrites).
Excuse the mess, I’m building a new house. :-)
Rev David Brindley:
Wonderful! Just don’t get accidentally stuck in Australia.
While the only women to be Prime Minister of the UK have been conservatives, the last two ascended to impossible situations, and were shot down rather quickly. I can’t help but think that members would be circling the wagons around Boris Johnson after similar bad judgment calls early in his term, or any other man. Truss is resigning before she even figured our her job.
I’m not defending Truss, I’m just observing that the Tories are not necessarily the Land of Opportunity for women in England disaffected by the Labour enthralldom into gender-slavery. May didn’t get much of a chance to do what Boris ended up pooching, a decent post-Brexit accord with Europe.
Another asymmetry I’ve noticed.
It’s interesting that so many trans activists seem to believe that women couldn’t possibly be interested in defending their own rights and interests when they attempt to retain or regain single sex services, facilities, and positions for exclusively female use. This supposed concern is just a smokescreen to disguise hatred of trans folk. Women who point out the harms to women and girls arising from implementing policies that allow trans identified males into spaces previously reserved for women and girls only, don’t really care about women or girls at all, they just want to attack trans people. So, according to this view, women must have no stake at all in things that would benefit them. As women. What an odd thing to say. This is particularly strange when such accusations of dishonesty and insincerity come from trans activists who are not themselves trans. Maybe this is a pre-emptive deflection designed to divert attention from their blatant misogyny, which is thinly veiled by an opportunistic concern for trans “rights.” What better way to get away with being abusive (and be rewarded for it!), all in the name of “the most marginalized and oppressed group ever.” Ever accusation is a confession, right?
I found this discussion quite good.
https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/savage-minds-podcast/id1535634480?i=1000582463732 Guest is Michael Biggs
Queer theory at work even in County Durham.
The paper calls it “adult baby community” when what they really mean is “paedophile ring”.
https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/23064296.hartlepool-man-adult-baby-fetish-caught-indecent-images-children/
From Twitter:
“The NHS has published its new service specifications for kids with gender dysphoria. They state its primary purpose is psychosocial/psychological interventions. This is huge. Mermaids/Maugham/Webberley are furious. I can’t understand why more people aren’t talking about it.”
https://twitter.com/FeministRoar/status/1583493742895300620?cxt=HHwWmICglezK2fkrAAAA
Draft service specifications have been made, and a public consultation (closing on 4 December) is now open:
https://twitter.com/Transgendertrd/status/1583768356418908160?cxt=HHwWgMDTrbq71vorAAAA
Sandra Boynton, in August, published a 45th anniversary edition of her first book, Hippos Go Berserk. She posted on Facebook today that she mostly updated the art work without changes, but she did add a few things. She showed one changed image from the book, a scene including a hippo with a scarf, and she noted that the Gryffindor scarf is new.
The first comment was complaining about the scarf, couldn’t she have called it something else, because the Harry Potter author has become so hateful.
I don’t know if Boynton has waded into the gender ideology issue, but I was thinking of getting a copy of the book anyway, and the Gryffindor scarf sold one today.
She’s working on a sequel, titled Hippos Remain Calm.
The brilliant Dr Em and someone I didn’t previously know called Bradders (on Twitter) were detained by police after the FILA conference in Cardiff after Bradders asked a man to leave a women’s toilet. The man complained to police that Bradders had threatened to punch him and that she’d been taking cocaine.
The police arrested Bradders and Dr Em went along with her to the police station. They tried to persuade Bradders to apologise (to whom and for what I don’t know) under the Restorative Justice scheme. They said they’d let her go if she did. Admirably, she refused on the grounds that she’d done nothing wrong. She told police that she had video of the encounter which proved her innocence.
They released her at 4am.
I’m not sure yet whether they’ve charged her with anything.
The punchline:
The complaint (by the man in the woman’s toilet) was recorded as being by a woman.
Update: I’ve spoken to Bradders. She wasn’t charged, thankfully. She’s trying to get the police to explain in writing why they arrested her and on the basis of what evidence.
Update on the Sandra Boynton situation. That picture has prompted over 900 comments, with many additional comments deleted. None of the other recent posts on her page have received nearly that many comments. Lots of people have expressed their “disappointment”, in varying degrees, that Boynton chose to mention that the scarf on one hippo is a Gryffindor scarf. In a reply to a comment, she wrote:
Which to me sounds perfectly consistent with:
from Rowling.
I think Boynton was completely blindsided by the level of controversy. I doubt she’s looked at the issue at all, and she doesn’t indicate any interest in doing so. She just wanted to post a picture from her book, and it uses iconography from the extremely popular Harry Potter books. I’m pleased that she hasn’t thus far disavowed the use of the name “Gryffindor” to describe the scarf, even as myriad comments express glee that the colors match those of some other entity.
I shared the post.
Imagine making a fuss about an orange and yellow scarf on a cartoon hippo.
Brilliant piece by Victoria Smith on the Friday Night Penis Pianist
https://thecritic.co.uk/A-dick-move/
I was reading the memoir of retired FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood. This passage caught my attention:
[He then cites some specific examples, which I’ll spare the B&W readership.]
It should go without saying that I am not asserting that all, or even most cross-dressers are acting out their misogynistic fantasies. But some of them appear to be doing so. As we have so often noted on these pages, it’s clear that some trans-identified males are dangerous, which means that taken as a group, they’re all less than trustworthy.
There’s a TERFy event in London on 2nd December at which I will be.
There are plans for lunches/brunches on 2nd and 3rd. If anyone’s around and wants to meet up, let me know. Lots of good people will be there.
The excuse is the launch of the book Transpositions, organised mostly by Sarah Phillimore and moley, I think. It’s people’s accounts of peaking.
Picture shared by Abortion Access Front (used to be Lady Parts Justice League):
I beg to differ.
A reminder? No, a claim, and a false one at that.
All gender identities get abortions? No. Women get abortions. Women may or may not claim to have gender identities, these gender identities don’t’ get abortions, the women do. Men don’t get abortions. Men may also claim gender identities. The idea that the set of gender identities claimed by men (for example, “cis male”) is a subset of the set claimed by women strains credulity. So this fails in multiple ways.
Since the dawn of time? Not before the Earth existed. Not before humans existed. Not before language existed. Not before some people decided that how you feel inside was more important for classification than your actual sex. And that wasn’t until a small number of years ago. So, very far from “the dawn of time”.
[…] a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany Room […]
These ghouls can’t leave anything alone.
https://twitter.com/HC_Richardson/status/1587261274488029185?s=20&t=KmiRC16iWi3iqKOq0HUt6A
Uggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh
My Granddaughter has returned.
Two years ago, at the age of twelve, she began delving into the rabbit hole of gender woo. I believe this was partly driven by her closest friend, a girl treated as a boy by his family and the school, and partly as a response to her being sexually assaulted two years earlier.
She had spiralled so low that she was making accusations of sexual assault against one of her mothers (not the birth one and later found to be lies), refused to go home, and ended up living with me and her grandmother for 6 months while we worked to reconcile her with her parents. We attended counselling with her where she said she was trans, didn’t think I would accept her for that, and I was given the gender
fairybread person. I gave the counsellor a reading list!She returned home and not long after we moved a 2 hours drive away. She went from being a Harry Potter fan (devoured the books as an 8 year old) to hating JKR because of her anti trans views. She could not be dissuaded. She cut her hair short and wanted to be called Liam.
She stayed in contact with her grandmother but rarely spoke with me. I accepted it but was sure the phase would pass. I was happy to give her time and space to work it out.
Three weeks ago she stayed 4 nights during the school holidays. On the drive, she again raised the subject of pronouns, telling me there were hundreds of them, and that I should respect people’s pronouns. Driving at 120 km/hr isn’t the best time for a discussion, so just let it lie. She also told us she had decided to grow her hair long again. She was as talkative as she used to be, no longer the sullen teenager we had to face.
On the second day of the visit, she asked if I still had all the Harry Potter videos and if we could watch some. Strike me PINK! Something’s afoot here. We had a good visit, just like the old times and I was sad to take her home.
Last night she was on the phone with her grandmother and asked to speak to me. She was upset that she’d been dumped from a friendship circle at school, something that happens all too often with teen girls. I had always been the one she turned to for advice on these matters in the past. I made supportive noises and told her a joke.
Then, she told me of an old woman that she helped out when she was lost. She told me the old woman said she is pretty. I asked her how that made her feel “Good, really good”, she answered. And so did I.
My granddaughter is back.
That is brilliant news.
Really pleased to hear that.
@25: I’m so glad to hear that!
O.M.G.
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/195394/pseudoscientific-american-jumps-the-shark-blames-pelosi-attack-on-gc-activism
An article in The Atlantic on parent-child estrangement.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/01/why-parents-and-kids-get-estranged/617612/
I note this:
We have all seen countless lists outlining the various features of pseudoscience such as Bob Park’s “The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science”. Some of us have even written such lists ourselves. I thought it might be interesting to attempt something similar for Bogus Social Justice Movements (henceforth referred to as BSJMs). Examples of BSJMs include MRAs, incels, the dominant strand of trans rights activism, NAMBLA, the pro porn/pro “sex work” lobby etc*. Attempts to portray legitimate criticisms of Islamism as “Islamophobia” or portray legitimate criticisms of the Israeli occupation of Palestine as “antisemitism” can be understood in the same terms**. As with pseudoscience, there is no non-arbitrary place to “draw a line”, such that everything on one side is 100% legitimate social justice activism and everything on the other side is 100% bogus social justice activism. Rather than a sharp definition we must make do with a set of criteria. Most BSJMs will probably meet most of these criteria to some degree, but none has to meet all of them 100%. So, without further ado, I give you
The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Social Justice Movements
1. People vs. Ideas
• The goal of every legitimate social justice movement is to protect real live human beings from injustice and harm.
• BSJMs are usually more concerned with protecting ideas, behaviors, belief systems, ideologies, cultures, traditions, policies, or ways of life. Criticism of what people think, say, or do is re-interpreted as an attack on who they are.
2. Unstated Premises
• BSJMs make frequent appeals to non-specific “rights” that their opponents are accused of denying or violating. Even the most basic tenets of their cause are based on premises and definitions that are best left unspecified.
3. Dubious Connection to Harm
• Every legitimate social justice movement can provide endless examples of obvious, demonstrable injustice and harm.
• BSJMs make exaggerated claims of “harm”, as well as “oppression”, “hate”, “persecution”, “violence” etc. based on a Danish cartoon or the proper use of pronouns (!). The alleged “harm” only shows up at the other end of a long chain of impossibly sloppy inferences and extrapolations and stretching of word-meanings beyond the breaking point. Quite frequently the apocalyptic rhetoric boils down to the implicit threat that the alleged “victims” themselves will hurt themselves or others if they don’t get their way.
4. No Debate
• Every legitimate social justice movement is actively seeking to change hearts and minds through open debate. If anything, their opponents are the ones who are trying to shut down debate because their position is indefensible.
• BSJMs are more concerned with silencing dissent and forcing their views down people’s throats unexamined through intimidation and bullying. Anything other than blind, unconditional agreement in advance is spun as debating their “right to exist” (#2) etc.
5. Conflicts with Real Social Justice Movements
• No real social justice movement is attempting to make other oppressed or marginalized groups less safe from injustice or harm.
• What BSJMs call “oppression” usually boils down to other groups having rights on their own (the right to free speech, the right to leave the dominant religion, the right of lesbians to be uninterested in your “lady cock” etc.).
6. Appropriation/Forced Teaming
• BSJMs appropriate real social justice movements and claim monopoly on speaking in their name while being actively hostile to their goals (#5). Every right and protection gained by other marginalized groups is re-interpreted as belonging to the usurpers instead of the people for whom they were originally intended (and the people who did all the actual work fighting for them).
7. Institutional Capture
• Real social justice movement usually play with open cards.
• BSJMs are more inclined to work by stealth to capture institutions from the inside and change legislation with little or no meaningful debate or accountability (#4). One favorite strategy is sneaking weasel words into bills that were introduced to protect other groups (#6) and use them as a trojan horse for the BSJM’s own agenda.
* As I recently commented there was a time, not too long ago, when the same applied to smokers.
** This remains true even if we concede that bigotry and hate against Muslims and Jews is a real and very serious problem.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany […]
(Plagiarizing my Facebook page in reference to this article.) This is a very cool find in itself, and it provides evidence that Basque was being written before the Romans came to the area. But there are a couple of things about the article that bug me. First, the headline: this doesn’t shed any light on the “origins” of Basque (whatever that means); instead, it provides some evidence for what scholars of Basque already knew–that Basque was spoken in the region before the Romans came. The more interesting aspect is that this seems to show that Basque was written before the Romans came along. Before this discovery, the earliest direct evidence of Basque came from Roman transcriptions of Basque names (both place names and person names).
The other thing that bugs me is calling Basque “mysterious”. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about Basque. True, it’s a language isolate, meaning that it has no known linguistic relatives, but the most likely reason for that is that it’s the last remnant of the languages that were spoken in Europe before the Indo-Europeans moved in and established (or imposed) their languages on most of the continent. For whatever reason (probably because no one thought it was worth trying to conquer a bunch of sheep herders in the Pyrenees) Basque survived while the others died out. Not mysterious, just fortuitous.
Basque does have a lot of features that don’t exist in Indo-European languages, such as ergativity, but that’s not terribly uncommon in other world languages. There’s really no need to exoticize the language.
But anyway, read the article. It’s really cool. (And the one word they’ve deciphered so far is related to the modern word “zorionak”, which means roughly “congratulations” but is also used for “Happy Birthday”, “Happy New Year”, and so on.)
The Battle for Terf Island is not won
Free from paywall thanks to Web Archive:
The movement is not about rights, it is about subjgation. Subjugation not only of women and LGB, but all of us who speak English, or want to discuss a serious topic.
Ministry officials declare that this not official policy and was not authorized to be released.
*tears hair*
I was reading a recent New York Times article about how gambling interests have infiltrated American college sports, now that sports betting is legal. It’s a fine article about an appalling situation, and I don’t wish to get into the weeds here about it, but there is one aspect I thought I’d mention.
The gambling interests have provided financial incentives to the schools to promote and publicize their particular gambling sites or apps. Much of the outside money that goes to colleges for major sports goes directly to the athletic department, for good reasons, and as required by NCAA “regulations”. These gambling financial incentives are mostly expected to go to athletic departments as well. But these gambling contracts were a clandestine maneuver, and many people involved in financial and athletic oversight are upset about them; some are calling for the funds to go somewhere other than the athletic departments.
College athletes are disproportionately from marginalized communities. Given that, one official suggested that the financial incentive money should go toward: promoting Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion. Huh. This was likely an off-the-cuff response, but it strikes me as the wrong thing to do. I don’t have a high opinion of such programs, either for their results or their aims. But why not suggest that the money goes toward education, the core mission of the school? Is this college now, a bunch of sports teams and diversity programs, with education no higher than third place in the priority list?
Yes. Has been for a long time.
Kellie-Jay “Posie Parker” Keen just got an…. interesting phone call. So of course she recorded the whole thing and put it on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC905EneF0s
I just watched that. Infuriating.
NYT teaser headline, which doesn’t match the actual headline on the page: In Women and Nonbinary People, Monkeypox Cases May Have Been Missed. I wonder what was found? This:
Oh. So men caught the disease one way, and women another. Not a darn thing to do with gender. It would have been so much simpler to just say “men” and “women”, but no, the researchers and reporters needed to go through all these verbal contortions.
And note, there are “men”, but they don’t go through verbal contortions to leave out “nonbinary people who were assigned female at birth” or “transgender men”. They know what a “man” is, but not a “woman”.
Funny that it’s “As in men, sexual contact was most likely to be the source of infection among transgender women” when surely it should be “As in men and nonbinary people, sexual contact was most likely to be the source of infection among transgender women.”
Interesting thread here.
Journalist E J Rosetta has had a change of mind (“peaked”, she calls it) after researching what was intended to be a critical piece on J. K. Rowling:
“3 months of dedicated research & I cannot find a single truly transphobic JK Rowling quote that stands up against the scrutiny of journalistic integrity.
The abuse JK has endured is beyond forgiveness. Every death threat, r*pe threat & torrent of abuse, she has born w/ grace. ”
https://twitter.com/ejrosetta/status/1595060667446595587
Nice one, but sounds familiar:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2022/one-groups-rights-are-being-sacrificed-for-the-other/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=one-groups-rights-are-being-sacrificed-for-the-other
:)
Whoops!
No worries! There’s way too much to keep track of, duplicates are inevitable.
Just… Ugh.
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/31/1069428211/parents-selling-children-shows-desperation-in-afghanistan (Funny how there’s been no surge of trans women in Afghanistan.)
The link in #46 was broken. Here’s the link without the surrounding HTML.
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/31/1069428211/parents-selling-children-shows-desperation-in-afghanistan
Awful story.
Interesting piece in The Spectator by Julie Bindel:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/where-did-it-all-go-wrong-for-trans-charity-mermaids/
And here’s a depressing thought experiment to go with the article.
Imagine two British people, who read UK publications over the last ten years.
Person A reads the Guardian, The New Statesman and Tribune regularly.
Person B reads the Times, the Spectator and the Economist regularly.
Which person is going to be reading the most accurate articles about the Trans controversy?
Sadly, Person B.
Cringeworthy pablum in a Facebook post image/meme from a group called “Gender Inclusive Schools”:
I can see the superficial point of not turning kids into personal projects and trying to force-fit them into molds. But the wording and implications of the actual text are troubling. It might not be so troubling if this kind of wording was not so often used to obscure important issues, but that’s what we have.
Once again, the confused use of “who you are” causes problems. I’m sure most of what they are talking about here are physical characteristics or aspects of character and mental state. “Who you are” is a particular individual, regardless of what you look like or how you act. “That’s not who I am” is more accurately “That’s not the way I wish to act” or “wish to be perceived” or “would like to be treated” or “prefer to look”. Yes, of course parents provide guidance on behavior and expectations; no, parents generally don’t wonder if their child is really a different person, perhaps a 13th century monk.
I don’t think it is at all appropriate to intend to celebrate everything children think or feel about themselves. Children sometimes feel pretty crappy about themselves; there is no reason to celebrate that. But even more positive things may be strongly at odds with the views of the parents, and I think advocating “celebration” is asking the parents to lie. I have great respect for people who can accept that other people, including their own children, might pursue something that the parents find awful, and the parents might support them in this endeavor, but I think demanding that the parents stop thinking this endeavor is awful, and even celebrate it, is too much. I see a lot that kind of sentiment in this meme. No, we parents don’t need to celebrate everything, nor even allow it.
It seems obvious to me that a hidden aspect of “who they are” in this meme has to do with gender identity and sexuality. As before, I don’t think parents are obliged to celebrate a child’s declaration, nor even to agree. I hope sensible parents can push back against gender identity declarations, and assert that people are not born in the wrong body, it isn’t possible to change sex, sex is a biological characteristic. I do hope that all parents, whether they agree or not with these declarations, can express love for their children.
How are the parents even supposed to know if their teachers are instructed not to consullt them about gender issues
Sackbut,
The absurdity of that proposition should be self-evident (“Serial murderer is what he is, and I love him for that”), but I wonder how they would feel if their child came out as a gender critical feminist.
You really wonder if the person who wrote this made the slightest attempt to imagine how it would play out in real life, with real kids.
“Who you are is a drug user.”
“Who you are is a girl being groomed by the creepy dude next door.”
“Who you are is a kid who gets drunk at parties and drives too fast.”
“Who you are is a gun fetishist with a grudge.”
“The more deeply I know you, the more beautiful you become to me.” Parent of the year, that one! Even “good kids” need guidance, and boundaries!
Even if this were only intended to apply in the narrow field of a kid’s sense of gender identity, I would think that if “who you are” includes being deeply unhappy with one’s body, it would be more compassionate to try to alleviate the root of the problem than to play along with a child’s delusion.
The 11th Circuit just released its decision reversing Judge Cannon’s order appointing a special master. That case is remanded with instructions to dismiss.
No doubt Trump will request review by the Supreme Court, but I don’t like his chances. The SCOTUS majority may consist largely of conservative hacks, but none of them seem to be willing to go to bat for Trump’s personal interests as opposed to those of the GOP generally.
So I was reading this article on how the Effective Altruism movement is grappling with the exposure of Bankman-Fried as a crook, and came across this odd but familiar reference:
I don’t really have a point to make, just thought it was amusing.
That is amusing! Also wrong – Elevatorgate was a sexism scandal, not a sexual one.
Seems like a thousand years ago now.
I just found this unpleasant article, “How To Start A Fire” by someone called Ben Miller.
In this piece, Miller blames gender-critical activists for the terrible shooting at Club Q. He lumps people who object to the use of puberty blockers to treat young people with gender dysphoria in with conservatives and fascists. it’s quite a rant:
https://archive.ph/43uHF#selection-1095.35-1095.104
As reported elsewhere here on B&W I was granted a Substack blog account and I think it’s a shame to let it go to waste. I did get around to writing my first post, a brief essay on the notion that transgender rejection is a RW thing:
https://mikehaubrich.substack.com/p/hello-world?sd=pf
“People need to tear down their own roadblocks” – excellent quotable. Excellent post.
Thanks, I’m glad you like it!
Letter to the New York Times from Professor Marc B. Garnick about the use of Lupron as a “puberty blocker”.
Professor Garnick has studied the effects of Lupron for the FDA. He says we are still learning about the effects of the drug on older people, and “woefully little safety data” are available for Lupron’s effects on children and adolescents.
https://twitter.com/hpmacd/status/1597600446675570688
https://archive.ph/4pqfc
Mike:
I guess by that determination I am not a man. I have never managed to grow a single bear in my whole life! ;-)
They’re almost as difficult as orchids!
A bit of levity, not intended by the comic but funny anyway. I think I’m going to start calling transactivism “the TiM-first movement”.
https://www.gocomics.com/fminus/2022/12/03
I just came across this HuffPo article: My Daughter Got A New Haircut. I’m Shocked By The Things Strangers Now Say To Her.
The 12-year-old girl in question, Jenny, is, in fact. a girl. She got a short haircut. Some dad with a daughter on the opposing soccer team referred to Jenny using masculine pronouns. Jenny’s teammates corrected him by saying “You need to check your pronouns, buddy”. Jenny’s father gets tied up in knots about how Jenny has “identified with her birth gender for her entire life”, and wonders if the other man was concerned about an unfair advantage or was making a political statement about trans people. Jenny’s father also offers to discuss “why you’re so concerned with the body parts below our daughter’s beautiful head of hair”.
In the current climate, I can’t fault the man for wondering, nor can I fault him using masculine pronouns for someone who he thought was male. The correction is not about pronouns, but rather that Jenny is a girl with short hair. If Jenny were actually a trans-identified male, I would assume that well-meaning “trans allies” would similarly say that Jenny is a girl with short hair, and not turn it into a question of not knowing the bespoke pronouns of everyone in the world, including those you’ve never spoken a word to. If the man were in fact told that Jenny is a girl, then maybe he was being rude by continuing to use them, but if it was about “checking pronouns”, that’s just nonsense.
The man may indeed have been concerned about the unfair advantage of having a boy on the team, and that’s a legitimate concern, although perhaps less so at 12 than a few years later. I’m sure the “body parts” Jenny’s father was talking about were primary and secondary sex characteristics; he was missing things like height, bone density, musculature, body shape, and other characteristics that do provide sports advantages to males.
There do appear to be other instances, mentioned but not described in detail, where Jenny was presumed to be a boy. In the current climate,entirely too many girls are influenced to pretend to be boys, and one thing they might do is cut their hair short. I don’t know how Jenny’s father expects people to tell the difference. He seems accepting of the idea that girls pretending to be boys shall be referred to as boys, but dammit he wants his daughter to be seen as a girl. even by strangers. People have been mistaking short-haired girls for boys, and long-haired boys for girls, for many years, since well before the current “gender ideology” craze, but it’s worse now, and he doesn’t see that.
The BBC 100 Women list is out! Let’s play How Many Men Are On It?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-75af095e-21f7-41b0-9c5f-a96a5e0615c1
2, that I know of.
And those two men are in there as “first trans woman to do x”, whereas there are women on the list who have won the Fields medal, Olympic medals, risked their lives in numerous ways…
“First bloke to do X while pretending to be a woman” does not exactly compare to those achievements.
In addition to not belonging on a 100 women list, in addition to knocking women OFF the 100 women list.
Back in July, Ophelia posted about a find that shed light on the dinosaurs’ Very Bad (Last) Day:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2022/quite-a-find/
It might be the case that one of the researchers committed fraud in a paper written up about the find:
https://www.science.org/content/article/paleontologist-accused-faking-data-dino-killing-asteroid-paper
DePalma failed to include the raw data from the isotope studies his findings were based on, did not include on the sampling techniques and protocols, or the name of lab that was used for the analysis. Also, in an extreme version of “the dog ate my homework,” the technician who is said to have performed the isotope work has since died, and is unavailable for comment.
Along with this, During noted some oddities in the data that was presented. Her critique makes interesting reading. Much of it is far too technical for me to fully grasp, but from what I do get, it sure seems that DePalm’s paper sounds pretty dodgy.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/9B9D041BD4D3633C2D4F99D002DF87
PZ praises the students of his university, and shows what petty shits they are (students and PZ both):
What follows is a photo of some decorative crap, including a badge with the message “JK Rowling fucking sucks”.
Good grief.
In Scotland women who complain about trans ID males in their women only hospital wards may be removed, and the administrators equate such complaints with racism.
I follow Pharyngula so you don’t have to and this is pretty funny:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2022/12/11/these-are-the-kinds-of-christmas-gifts-popular-with-the-kids-today/
Why haven’t “They” made this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches
into a movie?
Re #74
Looks like one was made in Russian in 1981:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0232882/
There was a 2017 short film:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8683382/
I saw a reference to possibly another film on the topic, but I couldn’t tell whether it was the 2017 film or a film still in production.
The Russian film is available to rent on Amazon Prime Video under the title “Nights Witches in the Sky”.
Thanks.
American Girl dolls jumps on the trans bandwagon. It’s all about promoting body positivity through drugs.
I delved into the comments, and came across this unintentionally comical exchange:
Commenter 1:
Commenter 2 responds:
I love a dash of irony in the morning.
An article about The J&B ad in which a grandfather learns to put on makeup to receive his trans granddaughter for Christmas.
This ad, and the glowing uncritical article, seem backwards to me. For those who don’t wish to view the video: a grandfather buys makeup and secretly learns to apply makeup to his face. When his grandson, who has decided he is female, comes to visit, the grandfather helps him with makeup before introducing him as a “granddaughter”, and as such he is accepted and welcomed by the family.
If the young man were simply effeminate and gender nonconforming, it would make perfect sense for the grandfather to experiment with makeup and women’s clothing to show the grandson acceptance. The grandfather’s acts of helping the young man with the makeup also fits perfectly well with this variant of the story.
But the young man is claiming to be a young woman. The grandfather is not claiming to be a grandmother. It is possible to learn to apply makeup to someone else without applying it to yourself, and I suspect those are somewhat distinct skills. I would think that a man performing femininity, while making no claims whatsoever of being female, might be perceived as mocking the “trans” youth.
Imagine if a Christian youth converted to Judaism, so the grandfather tried wearing a kippah and growing payos and wearing tallit, as if the appearance, rather than the religious practice and the actual claim of being Jewish, were the most important thing.
I forgot to mention that the book Transpositions, compiled by Sarah Phillimore and Al Peters (moley) is available on Amazon:
https://twitter.com/doodle_bobby/status/1602741539444297729
It’s a collection of people’s peaking stories. I have the Kindle version, but I’d recommend the paperback, it’s one of those books that’s good to flick through. Some of the stories are heartbreaking.
I went to the book launch event, which was some high quality TERFing. As you might have heard, Sarah advertised it on EventBrite who pulled the event for “Hateful, Dangerous, or Violent Content.” Then the venue contacted her to ask her not to mention the venue online because they were afraid of violence. In the end, there was no ‘protest’ at all, which was almost an anti-climax.
Sarah is suing EventBrite and has a crowdfunder here:
https://democracythree.org/campaign/stop-tech-censoring-women-help-me-sue-eventbrite/
Here’s menno reading some of the stories:
https://youtu.be/jYsFxvpeEqI
[…] a comment by latsot at Miscellany […]
The Kennedy Center announced this year’s Mark Twain Award winner. Adam Sandler. Adam fucking Sandler.
Now I’ll confess I’ve never seen an Adam Sandler movie–the most I’ve seen is a few previews, plus some of his SNL routines, and frankly life is too short to sit through an Adam Sandler movie–so I’m probably in no position to criticize the award. But there’s something more basic that’s bugging me. Mark Twain was a writer. He gave some public performances of his material, of course, but he earned his fame through his writing.
Here is a list of the winners of the award over the years. Some of them are (or were) very funny (Richard Pryor, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin); others, not so much (Will Ferrell? Really?). But with the exception of Neil Simon, none of them are famous for their writing. They’re entertainers, not writers (and even Simon’s writing is meant to be performed, not read). So why do they get an award named for a writer and not, say, Dave Barry or Alexandra Petri?
They should rename it the Groucho Marx award. Then at least it wouldn’t be a category error, even when it’s a travesty.
A twitter thread by my friend Henrietta who, as you will see, is a total badass.
This is happening to disabled women who need care. I can only barely begin to understand the anxiety she and other women must feel if their care can’t be guaranteed to be provided by an old-fashioned woman of the female sex.
I do know that whenever my chair is out of commission, I am frantic. I know I’m usually angry enough that the Hulk would take a few steps back, but I’m fairly stoic about myself and what’s happened to me. But here’s me saying I am frantic if I don’t have use of my wheelchair, even if I’m not planning to go anywhere. Stands to reason, it hits me in my voonrables.
And here’s Henrietta, describing her daily routine and saying why she needs care from a woman. She’s been abused for days by men and women who say that she should not be allowed to put her safety, dignity, autonomy and anxiety above the feelings of men who want to abuse vulnerable women.
There are a few people who’ve made me feel humble over the last fifty years. H is one. She’s such a delightful. funny woman who cares about everybody before she cares for herself.
Read her stuff, if you can bear Twitter.
And Ophelia: you could do worse than ask if she’ll expand on her thread here, if you think it fits.
https://twitter.com/hen10freeman/status/1603022204467351556
Thank you for the introduction to Henrietta.
Re Adam Sandler
I think he was very good in The Wedding Singer. His stand-up rap about “phone, wallet, keys” is hilarious. I don’t think I’ve seen the entirety of any of his other movies, because they are usually in a “goofy comedy” genre I don’t usually bother to watch, but the portions I’ve seen are not impressive.
Excellent point that so many of the winners have produced no well-known literary humor.
I think I disagree a little about the Mark Twain award and the idea that Richard Pryor, Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin are not writers but entertainers. They all write/wrote their own material, don’t/didn’t they? Aren’t they writer/performers? The thing about Twain is that he started out as a humorist. I know nothing about the award but I’m guessing it’s for people who do both? Write their own material and perform it?
Futrelle posted about Rowling’s crisis shelter. Guess what? Apparently the whole thing is just a cynical move to make something the poor men that want to be women can’t have.
And other stupidity.
I wonder if Futrelle has ever seen Monty Python’s Life of Brian? He might take exception to Reg’s telling Loretta that they can’t have a baby.
Jeezus.
Ophelia @85,
It’s true that some of the past winners of the award wrote their own material, or at least much of it, but I don’t think it’s true of all of them (Lorne Michaels? Julia Louis-Dreyfus? Jay Leno?). And I’m not disparaging performers or comedy writers as a group–clearly it takes talent to do it well, and many of the winners of the prize are (or were) brilliant. But writing to perform is a different talent than writing to be read–unless you have the talent of Shakespeare, the full impact doesn’t come across on the page. It’s like giving Dylan the Nobel for literature–whatever you think of his songwriting, I’d argue that it’s a different category than literature.
Also, Wikipedia says this about the award (I tried accessing the Kennedy Center site, but it won’t let me in):
I can sort of see how that applies to some of the winners, but does anyone think that Will Ferrell has an “uncompromising perspective of social injustice and personal folly”?
I wasn’t talking about the whole list, which I haven’t looked at. Just those three specific examples got my attention because of the writing their own material aspect.
But hey, it’s the Kennedy Center. What even is that? Kennedy himself was one of those inflated figures so maybe it’s sort of appropriate that it pretends Jay Leno is a Great Writer.
Good point. (The Kennedy Center is sort of a quasi-official performing arts center in DC. It puts on Important Performances in a venue that probably seemed modern when it was designed in the sixties. We’ve seen some good shows there over the years, but it’s not cutting edge.)
Respectable art!
They put the “in” in “institution”!
Meet Stella. Sella has a hobby. No, an obsession.
Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmiXX3TVQeY
Ah god I’ve seen Stella before, I love Stella. [mops streaming eyes]
Connecticut rule allowing transgender athletes in girls’ school sports upheld
The usual lie is packaged in the article heading – the issue is male athletes in girls’ sports. Par for the course.
I’ll take correction from a lawyer, but the argument that a right has been breached seems strange to me. As we’ve said in response to Veronica Ivy’s claim ‘access to sports is a right’, no, at least not as an individually stated thing. This seems to me more like a breach of promise undertaken by the athletics association of that (and other) states, as they fail to provide a fair competition despite claiming so.
I suspect this different framing makes the burden on the moving party lighter, as breach of rights often requires stringent judicial tests.
I also take issue with the reasoning supplied in the verdict:
This is an argument with diminishing returns. It is only true so long as there are other competitions in which female participants can find a fair field, meaning the argument cannot be applied to every competition available – once the last competition succumbs, the premise of the argument – that there are other avenues available to women – is no longer true. And if an argument cannot be applied generally, then it seems it is not generally valid but relies on externalities to mitigate the impact its own successes.
Unfuckingbelievable.
[…] a comment by Holms at Miscellany […]
Absolutely dreadful article by someone called Naomi Gordon-Loebl in the Nation magazine. It’s called “Reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in the Age of Ron DeSantis.”
And it’s as bad as its title:
https://archive.vn/SjRnu
“These attacks, from the legislative to the interpersonal, have called upon trans people to prove our identities. Even mainstream news outlets regularly question our legitimacy: In October 2022, The New York Times ran a piece noting, and at times tut-tutting, an increase in top surgery among young people.”
2002: “If you don’t support George W. Bush and Tony Blair, then you support Osama Bin Laden.””
2022: “If you don’t support mastectomies for lesbian and autistic teenage girls, then you support Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.”
Sex Matters posted this blog entry and they include an analysis in three parts of the weakness in the science that claims to support an affirmation model for transgender children:
The “gender affirming” care model is built on sand
Here’s an excerpt:
And, yes, I know that this will not be persuasive to the people it really needs to reach (affirmation therapists,) because they will look at the source and decide that it’s transphobic hatred. I plan to read the articles today since I am on PTO for the week, and make notes for my substack.
The House Select Committee has announced its criminal referrals, including four against Il Douchebag of Sea-to-Lake. But one thing that caught my attention:
I don’t think the Secret Service blocked off the whole Mall; if not, you can imagine all the weapons that weren’t confiscated.
Apparently NASA is considering an all-female crew for a mission to Mars. The reason, according to a NASA article from 2014, is that women are smaller, less resource-intensive, and better able to withstand the rigors of such a flight. An inflammatory, undated headline recently lampooned by a friend of mine (no article link, just a screen shot) claimed it was to prevent the astronauts from having sex; the ensuing discussion (after they got off the topic of lesbian sex) assumed it was all about pregnancy prevention.
I might have expected this friend and others of his friends to say, “No, they can still get pregnant, because some of the women might be trans”. They are generally consistent trans advocates. But no. They tacitly recognize that NASA saying “all-female” really means all-female, not all-people-who-claim-to-be-women. They know what women are. They know there are differences. They just refuse to acknowledge them when inconvenient.
Behold, Stanford’s guide to the Elimination of Harmful Language!
https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguage.pdf
Yeah, it’s both as hilarious and infuriating as it sounds. It lists phrases deemed offensive, alternatives to use instead and the reason for the phrases being offensive in the first place.
Enjoy. But I think it’s worth pointing out their explanation of why “Karen” is offensive and the alternatives:
Word: Karen
Alternative: demanding or entitled White woman [capitalisation theirs]
Reason: This term is used to ridicule or demean a certain group of people based on their behaviors [crazy American spelling theirs*].
It’s… interesting that what I assume is a bloated committee of language police so completely failed to understand that the problem with “Karen” is the misogyny. Interesting but unsurprising.
* Oops, I mean surprising/wild US Citizen spelling
I’m extremely worried about the disastrous vote in Scotland about GRA ‘reform’. I still hold out some hope that there’s a legal avenue; Scotland must still abide by the Equality Act and this seems in flagrant defiance of it.
But I’m worried in particular about disabled women in Scotland, for a very particular reason. I explained it here.
https://twitter.com/latsot/status/1605962754640072709
This year’s defense budget means 61 F-35s… As much as they’ve annoyed me as an over engineered waste of resources over the years it does mean I needn’t worry about employment for a while. Wouldn’t mind seeing them escort humanitarian flights in Ukraine.
Bad news for the planet: Greenland’s glaciers are melting 100 times faster than estimated.
https://www.livescience.com/greenland-glacier-melt-model
Wo.
Warming denialisms – “More fresh water for the rest of us. About time Greenland stopped hogging it all!”
Tiny Tim’s freaky song The Other Side from 1968 comes to my mind again.
Warning, women, if you have any masculine tendencies at all, don’t die. They will trans you.
Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?
How many ways can the patriarchy tell women and girls that they must express feminity, or they will be shoved back into a gender cage. Not content with Joan of Arc, now the writer of a novel about women and girls must have been trans because she chafed against the gender roles of her time.
Saw an article about this advert on CNN.com, then found it on YouTube.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=187&v=LEshVJ1IECw&feature=emb_logo
The sentimentalization is pretty extreme.
Siiiiiiiiiiigh. That’s always been right on the surface with Alcott – everyone already knows it. See also: Willa Cather. Cue the headlines: there have always been women who didn’t embrace “femininity,” and they were still women. The Times must be desperate for filler.
Re #111, extreme indeed. I commented on it in #78 above, in the context of a silly article about the ad. It’s quite a mishmash.
So you did! Thanks for the heads up. I need to get to the misc. room more often.
Sack @78 I think I interpreted the beginning of the ad as the grandfather being a cross dresser in private, and not wanting the grandson to share in his shame, and nowadays it’s more acceptable, so he goes all out with his grandson? Maybe I was looking at a different aspect of it. I like your take on it better.
WaPo: Cutting through customer service doom-loops by calling in a ‘Karen’
https://www.karensforhire.com/
Gobsmacked. What could possibly go wrong?
I do note that they have both men and women working for them.
Yeah, so rather than push back against the “Karen” stereotype, they go with it and “harness” it. I’m not convinced.
Good grief. Imagine the Washington Post doing a story like that about hiring a “Rastus.”
This is interesting…a positive review of the film “Adult Human Female” by Elaine Graham-Leigh.
https://www.counterfire.org/article/adult-human-female-review/
What’s interesting is that “Counterfire” is an explictly Marxist website. Seems left-wing gender critical views might be coming back to UK debate now.
An article by Ceri Black that you might like. Ceri knows what she’s talking about. She did a PhD in queer theory and was fully mired in it for years. And now she’s being sued by Aiden Comorford, quite a journey.
Anyway, there are some interesting points in there from a queer theorist’s position.
https://ceriblack.substack.com/p/queer-praxis
One welcome change emerges from the chaos at Musk’s twitter: Glinner is back.
Grauniad: Transgender woman sues female-only app Giggle for Girls for alleged discrimination
This is an Australian TIM filing the suit. I get the impression that, given how this issue is going in Australia, he’s likely to win. I hope not.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B3m7ckGhnsc
More discussion here of Greta Thunberg and transism. It’s so sad.
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/236744/intelligent-gnc-female-bullied-for-her-looks-on-the-spectrum-showing-signs-sympt
PZ has a fascinating post today.
Huh. I wonder if this is applicable to anything popular today?
Alabama is involved in a legal fight over whether the state can criminalize certain aspects of “gender-affirming care”. It has subpoenaed WPATH, the AAP, and the Endocrine Society. The three organizations have filed a motion to quash the state subpoenas, claiming that the scope is overly broad and violates their First Amendment rights. I don’t know if they are justified, I don’t know if what the state is trying to do is reasonable, but I do get the distinct impression that the organizations have a lot to hide and are trying to do so.
Here is a philosophy paper that anyone – even your dog – can read:
Can a good philosophical contribution be made just by asking a question?.
That’s it! Just the title, no content. Three authors.
The contents are in fact identical to that of a paper in Annals of Improbable Research many years ago. The title of that paper was “Recent advances in artificial intelligence”. Plagiarism?
The brilliant Nina Paley was crowdfunding a comic book. Indiegogo cancelled it after it had met and exceeded the goal. No explanation, no chance for appeal, the money has already been returned to the donors.
https://twitter.com/ninapaley/status/1611122694304722946
The ‘reason’, of course, is certainly that she’s a TERF.
She’s determined to find another way to fund the book. She’s not a woman who is so easily silenced.
I absolutely love her work, check it out if you’re not familiar with it.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Further evidence that the trans movement is about reinforcing gender stereotypes. One of Angelina Jolie’s daughters has decided she doesn’t want to be a boy after all. But this manifests itself in changing from comfortable, baggy clothes to a hand-me-down designer dress from her mother, along with putting her hair up in a bun and putting on makeup. At least she’s not wearing heels. And of course the narrative is all about how beautiful she looks now.
She’s 15 years old.
Why can’t the narrative be that girls are allowed to wear baggy pants and jackets? (Or for that matter that boys can wear dresses and makeup?)
Prince Harry claims to have ended the lives of 25 “chess pieces” (aka human beings) and also claims to be neither satisfied or embarrassed by it. Callous much?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/uk/prince-harry-taliban-afghanistan-criticism-intl-gbr/index.html
Trouble in paradise…
https://twitter.com/TransActivismUK/status/1611831064166645766?s=20&t=__0EtRTT24bjLw9lVuA9zQ
Brazil is having its own Jan. 6th moment, and by some odd coincidence Bolsonaro happens to be in Florida.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/01/08/bolsonaro-invade-congress-lula/
This is interesting: “Tim Davie facing revolt over transgender Pride network ‘policing’ the BBC”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/08/tim-davie-facing-revolt-transgender-pride-network-policing-bbc/
Ooh that is interesting. Long overdue & interesting.
Grab your popcorn.
Man legally changed gender to gain custody of his kids. Trans groups are concerned.
A man in Ecuador has declared himself a woman in order to take advantage of Ecuadorian laws that favor the mother in child custody cases. Trans activists have said that his actions are “not in the spirit of the law”. No shit, Sherlock.
But a man who suddenly decides he’s a woman in order to be moved from men’s prison to women’s prison, or to use the women’s locker room, or to compete on the women’s team, that’s perfectly fine.
If I could change my body: https://youtu.be/8LR_w5dOLrU
NPR: The sports world is still built for men. This elite runner wants to change that
Terry Gross interviews Lauren Fleshman, an elite runner and the author of a new book, Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World. Fleshman makes many excellent points about the physical differences between men and women, and how so many things in women’s sports either fail to take those differences into account or are there for pleasing the male gaze. But somehow, when it comes to trans ideology, she suddenly loses the plot, and thinks it is possible both to be aware of sex differences and have women compete alongside men.
I’m guessing Fleshman knows that directly stating that males claiming to be women should not compete against females would cause her a lot of trouble. So she says inclusion of trans athletes is important, even though males have physical advantages of females when it comes to sport. But she doesn’t try to explain how that could be done. The trouble is that it really can’t be done but we mustn’t say that because it would hurt trans people. Or, rather, trans people would throw a fit. I can understand Fleshman not wanting to be a target herself.
I’m going to the Standing For Women event in Newcastle today (https://twitter.com/SFWnortheast/status/1613794277183852546). There are expected to be ‘counter-protesters’ there (by which I mean crybabies in masks) so there might be interesting things to report.
If you want to follow what’s happening on Twitter, the official account is @SFWnortheast and the most relevant tags are #LetWomenSpeak, #LetWomenSpeakNewcastle, #WomenTalking.
I expect footage of the talks (if they are allowed to take place) will be on KJK’s various spaces at some point. I’ll be filming what I can, but I won’t be able to get decent footage of the talks. I need my hands to get around so I’ll be using a chest-mounted camera and I’ll be in a crowd. And The mic isn’t great.
If you don’t know what these events are about, here’s KJK talking about the Newcastle one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG2gIR2HVWM
[…] a comment by latsot in Miscellany […]
Ok, I usually don’t comment directly on what goes on over at Pharyngula but I am going to say something about what’s apparently not going on: any mention of the Minnesota art professor fired for showing some paintings of Mohammed.
Maybe I missed it. Or maybe PZ has some personal or professional relationships with people involved and has prudently declined to comment. But this is exactly the sort of topic which would have once provided much material for posts and discussion. Despite all reasonable efforts, Muslim sensibilities are performatively “offended” by the mere presence of once-revered depictions of their prophet. It’s a perfect opportunity to rail about separation of church & state, as well as the way fundamentalist religion both infantilizes the believers and induces them to control others. It’s even local. But … nothing.
One possibility: religious identities have become included with marginalized racial & gender identities and to attack one is to implicitly attack them all. If it’s wrong for a Muslim to be psychologically scarred by Islamic art in an academic setting, it’s now arguably wrong for a trans-identified student to be psychologically scarred by gender critical views in an academic setting. Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Plus, being on the same side as religious Christian conservatives may no longer be considered an occasional and incidental byproduct of a consistent liberal commitment to integrity. It’s a red flag for being on the wrong side.
A no-brainer became a choice, and then the opposite choice became obviously better. I still find it surprising.
Maybe I missed it.
Ah well the more conformist of PZ’s commenters decided I was “Islamophobic” around the time of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, so it’s possible that he’s avoiding the Hamline issue lest they accuse him of “Islamophobia.” He’s captive to them at this point.
Scottsdale is one of the more conservative suburbs in Phoenix, but even that city’s government is too much government for a roque development out in the foothills. The people who built there, (in the desert) to escape government are now pissed that the governmet is not catering to their water needs. I used to hike near there, occasionally. Yes, it’s an idyllic location for living away from the hustle-and-bustle and the desert hills are beautiful. But this is a water issue in a dry state, and they’ve known this was coming for years and should not have built out there. The wells are dry.
Scottsdale Cuts off Water Supply Amid Drought.
We’ll see more and more of this in the coming years.
Carry on. Global warming is a hoax.
I guess they think water is magic.
The Washington Post had an excellent, disturbing series recently on abuse in the bodybuilding world, including of course sexual exploitation of female bodybuilders. Karen Attiah followed up with a mostly excellent opinion piece, pointing out that even female bodybuilders are vulnerable to the male gaze and male abuse. I say “mostly excellent” because this is the final paragraph:
There is an excellent response to her piece in the comments section.
Sastra, that is interesting.
A jolly little cake a young woman’s little sister made to celebrate the former’s double mastectomy.
https://twitter.com/ratgoku/status/1612262833059676160
This is all so desperately sad.
[…] a comment by What a Maroon at Miscellany […]
“Science Museum removes trans-inclusive display after ‘propaganda’ complaints
The Boy or Girl? gallery, featuring a fake penis and chest binders, was removed after objections it was ‘not science’”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/17/science-museum-trans-display-remove-propaganda-complaints/
A 17 year old girl is showering at the YMCA when a naked man walks in.
Here’s a video of her talking about how terrified she was. She is visibly upset thinking about her five year old sister and her friends being in that same locker room.
https://twitter.com/babybeginner/status/1615963611360563202
She spoke to the YMCA who confirmed that it’s just fine for grown men to shower with teenagers in their facilities and was made to feel as though she was at fault for simply asking
Here are some of the comments this seventeen year old woman received on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/babybeginner/status/1615963611360563202
There’s another Standing for Women event (similar to the one in Newcastle last week) in Glasgow on 5th February. I think I will probably go. It’s the same drill but there are lots of people going who I Twitter-know and would like to meet in person. Plus, who wouldn’t want to take that train journey along the north east coast?
But, more importantly, I found out yesterday that Scotland’s largest Furry convention will also be in town! It also includes the adult baby men!
How could I not go? The train up there will be like a mobile zoo!
I don’t expect much aggro between the feminists and the furries unless someone leaves the gate open and the furries escape *whistles innocently*. It’s OK, though, the women are all going to be armed with bottles of Febreze, which should ward the furries off. I’m not sure what to do about the adult baby men, though. It’s not as though punishment is going to work, is it? They’d just be back for more.
Anyway, noon on the 5th, at a TBA location near Queen St Station (the SFW thing, not the furry thing). The one after that is in Hyde Park on 26th, if anyone’s in London.
A stunning contribution from Babycham Socialist Owen Jones:
https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1616008459958231040
I’m sure you won’t let a little thing like being blocked by him get in the way of viewing this extraordinary piece.
Oh, and that’s not even the full video. Apparently the proper one goes on for 25 minutes of the same.
Enjoy.
Got this as a reply to my recruiting for a D&D game in my local FB social group: “However, I’m very into heavy role playing and am very queer so a queer friendly role playing group is something I am desiring.” It’s good for me to belong to the FB group, so I don’t want to ruffle any feathers, but fuck my life…
I think it’s a bloody TIF, but this I think is why we should’ve kept gatekeeping nerd shit… “Yes you can play, but you’re going to play *our* game; if you want something different do it somewhere else.”
Trump and his attorney Alina Habba sanctioned for just under a million dollars for their frivolous suit against Clinton, Comey, and dozens of others.
This is what we in the legal profession call “bad news” if you’re on the receiving end….
This is a scoldy tweet from a writer. I am not familiar with her, but apparently she thinks she is brilliant. I don’t know if your comment section will allow this sort of embedding, but I’ll give it a go. If it doesn’t work, I’ll add a new comment and just post a link to it.
This is the “men have already been invading women’s spaces for years, and the GRR doesn’t really change things, so just accept this new piece of paper” argument. And what we take out of this is the very tone-deaf repetition that there is only one demographic whose needs are important, and everyone else needs to accommodate them. Much like the guy in BC who only feels “comfortable in women’s spaces because men are muscular and I’m a slob,” it doesn’t really matter how the women in the restrooms, gyms, prisons, and other spaces where they are vulnerable to sexual assault, battery, or even just the leering that men do, as long as the men get access.
And, yes, it’s only really a problem for men in women’s spaces. Trans ID women do not bother men in private spaces because we are very rarely subject to such assaults by women, and are often flattered by women or men checking us out in the gym. We take it as admiration, not as intrusion.
What she conveniently ignores, or has decided doesn’t matter, is that this is a men’s movement to break away what few barriers have been propped up to give women space away from men. One wonders what trans ID males did to pee back when public office buildings only provided restrooms for men. Did they have to “hold it” until they got home, as women did? Did they have the urinary leash?
And another thing that is completely illogical about this GRR fracas: if it really changes nothing, then why is it so important to steamroll it through and to create a crisis in Scottish Devolution? It’s either absolutely vital or no big deal, it can’t be both.
Just like TERFs are a tiny minority of cranks who should be, and deserve to be marginalized and ignored, and an all-powerful cabal just moments away from unleashing trans genocide. Same tune, different lyrics.
I saw a notice that Women’s Declaration International would be at Artifacts Gallery in Athens OH. Why? I searched. AG is a clothing store. They posted some signage in favor of women and disagreeing with gender identity ideology. So of course there’s a boycott and a protest.
I found this article about the planned protest, and it’s the usual nonsense. The sign saying LGB with a rainbow and a heart? Not allowed without the T, it’s just part of the word or something. Can’t say people can’t change sex. Can’t say no to men in women’s sports. For these horrible statements, the store had to close temporarily.
https://www.thepostathens.com/article/2023/01/artifacts-gallery-protest-2023-weekender-main-transphobia
“Oh, and that’s not even the full video. Apparently the proper one goes on for 25 minutes of the same.”
Jones has a *monomaniacal* obsession with his imagined “anti-trans activists,” who are “frothing about trans people”, who have “allowed [their] humanity to rot away” and whose “anger and fury and bile” are a fixation for him. I’m not a psychologist, but the aggressive tone suggests a real insecurity about the issue for Jones.
I wonder is there any truth in the rumour that Jones was frustrated about not getting a position in a Corbyn Labour government, and decided to lash out at anyone he suspected of having gender-critical views as a response. He made them the scapegoat for his own disappointment.
Certainly, while Jones supported gender ideology before the December 2019 election defeat, I don’t remember it being the all-consuming obsession for Jones that it is now.
Seems to me Jones was on the naughty step a little while ago for something or other, so maybe he has to be even more furiously pro-trans in order to demonstrate loyalty, and to deflect further suspicion, running as fast as he can to stay in one place and not lose ground?
Dearie Me. Chase Strangio is furious at the recent NYT Times story about parents and trans minors:
“How many Sunday cover stories does the NYTs need that debate trans life?”
https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1617170020567506948?cxt=HHwWiICzlZnkq_EsAAAA
As is the extremist trans activist Ky Schevers :
“At this point, not noting that many anti-trans parent groups work with the far-right is not just enabling transphobia, it’s enabling fascism. The anti-trans movement is intertwined with the global far-right movement. The NYT is laundering fascism when it launders transphobia.”
https://twitter.com/reclaimingtrans/status/1617216728320155648
The actual NYT article is here. It seems pretty good:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/us/gender-identity-students-parents.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Aha, thank you.
@YNNB,
So group X is simultaneously weak and cowering, not deserving of our respect or even consideration as humans, and yet a dangerous, devious, all-powerful threat to the superior group’s existence that needs to be eradicated. Where have I heard that before?
A bit of local Alabama news that may be of interest here. This is about the internecine battles within the Alabama Democratic Party. The party has been largely ineffectual for a good few years. Part of the reason has been too much internal fighting about representation, and too little effort at developing and promoting candidates for office.
First, an article about the arguments over proposed by-laws changes. A few years ago, the “old guard” was pushed out, new by-laws written, and life seemed to be coming back to the party. Last year, some of the “old guard” returned to power, life was essentially snuffed out, and fights over the by-laws resumed.
Second, an excellent opinion column by Josh Moon about all this. He pulls no punches. He talks about the continuing fights over the minutiae of representation in a party that is all but irrelevant in the power structures of the state. The party is an extreme state of dysfunction, they promoted almost no candidates this election, they haven’t updated their web site or their Facebook page since August, and this is what they are worrying about.
I think this is yet another example where excessive emphasis on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion concepts has derailed genuine work, be it government, education, or what have you.
I had originally written this as a contribution to the comment thread responding to the story that Mike B mentioned here
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2023/making-any-member-feel-awkward/
before discovering that you needed to be a paid member to post. Not wanting to pay to do that, I thought I’d post it here instead. Keep in mind this was intended for a different audience, so forgive me if it reiterates arguments ideas I’ve made here already. But with fewer swears. The direct link to the story and its comment thread is here:
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/01/changing-the-definition-of-woman-patriotism-and-how-dictionaries-work.html#disqus_thread
Why oppose this definition: Women are adult humans who identify as female. As I said above, is it simply an unflinching desire to defend the truth about the dictionary meaning of a word? Or is there something else you object to?
I object to men who claim to be women being put into women’s prisons. This something that is already happening. I object to men claiming to women demanding access to women-only rape shelters. This is already happening. I object to the crimes of men claiming to be women being attributed to women, thus invalidating statistics used in policing, law enforcement and public policy. This is already happening. Why should “gender identity” (whatever that is) have any bearing on facilities, spaces, and positions allocated on the basis of sex? It shouldn’t; they are two completely different things. Yet trans identified males are demanding, and being given access to, what had once been women’s single sex spaces, all on the coat-tails of this new, non-standard definition of “woman.” This is not simply about defending the dictionary meaning of the word woman. It’s more importantly about the health, safety, and dignity of women. That hijacking and distorting language is one of the avenues through which women’s rights and safety are threatened, that is on those pushing the new definition of “woman” that includes men. “Of course transwomen are women! It’s right in the name!” Well, by such logic, sawhorses and pommel horses are horses, and I look forward with interest to their inevitable racing in the Kentucky Derby.
Language is more than just important in this discussion; it is vital. I will digress here to make a note on usage. In the interests of clarity, I do not use the term “transwoman” or “trans woman,” but “trans identified male” to refer to males who, for whatever reason, believe they are, or claim to be, women. They are not women of any kind. They never will be. If this is “transphobic,” then reality is transphobic. Trans identified males remain males however much or little they alter themselves surgically or hormonally. Keeping this fact clear makes discussion more open and honest. It makes what is at stake and what is being demanded more obvious.
Trans activists will sometimes admonish feminists for supposedly conflating “sex” and “gender,” but at other times use this very conflation to advance their cause, regardless of the cost and danger to women. Humans can’t change sex. So that’s a hard no for access to facilities segregated on the basis of sex. But somehow a male “perfoming femininty” is supposed to be given entrance to these spaces because he “identifies as” a woman. Dressing up as a woman is supposedly enough, but not even necessary. Under self identification, or “Self ID,” (which is a concept being pushed in many jurisdictions), any man, “trans” or not can claim to be a woman and gain entrance to women’s single sex spaces. This makes harder for women to defend these spaces, as it removes the ability to prevent any man from entering, because they might “identify as” a woman. This makes it easier for predatory males to access female only spaces. The best course of action is to bar all males from such spaces, however they might “identify”. Demanding entrance to women’s spaces automatically makes any such man a risk. It’s big red flag that women are being told to ignore.
…the real question is why are people so vexed and insistent about this? If you admit that people can change genders, why fixate on “but not sexes.” I don’t buy that it’s just about defending the truth. People who defend the idea that sex is malleable are not more confused about any of the “facts” that their detractors are.
This question works just as well in the opposite direction. People so keenly interested in breaking down the concept of sex, on redefining “woman’ in such a way that it includes men (while, curiously there is nowhere near the equivalent pressure and insistence on redefining “man” ) seem to have an intense interest in allowing men to have acces to women’s spaces, positions and facilities. That seems to be the whole point behind all of these efforts to redefine “woman.” Women are certainly the ones being asked to stand down, step aside and pay the price by letting men in. If humans can’t change sex, then yes, those who see sex as “malleable” are confused about the facts, and one is left to question why they are so insistant on defending something that isn’t so.
Being female is a condition of material reality, not something you can “identify” into if you are not female to start with. A man can no more become a woman through “identifying” as one any more than I can identify as an inverebrate, or as being made of antimatter. My identification and wishful thinking matters not a bit to the universe. I will remain a vertebrate made of ordinary matter for the rest of my life, however fiercely I may “identify.”
It’s interesting that some of the same people who object to Rachel Dolezal’s claim to be Black furiously deny that her imposture has any parallel with the claims of trans identified males, even though unlike sex, racial identity can be a “spectrum” depending on one’s parentage. Whatever one my think of the utility of the concept of “race,” people of diverse ethnic and geographic origins have children all the time, and they can exhibit a wide range of features that one might attribute to “racial” markers: skin colour, blood types, hair types, eye colour, etc. Without further investigation (and the testimony of her family), it could have been the case that Dolezal was of African American heritage. There is no way that a trans identified male is in any way female. The embarassing thing about the Dolezal/trans comparison is that trans claims are less credible, that is to say impossible. Yet rejecting Dolezal’s claim, while accepting those of men claiming to be women, like swimming cheat Wil(Lia)m Thomas is supposedly “progressive.”
In humans, sex is binary and immutible. The existence of people with disorders of sexual development (or, less accurately “intersex”) does not change this. Sex is not a “spectrum;” there is no third sex, no intermediate between sperm and ova. Certainly there is a small number of individuals with conditions of sexual development that represent edge cases, but those people are still male or female. Most DSDs are specific to one sex or the other. Their existence does not suddenly render the concepts of male and female useless and incoherent, any more than dawn and twilight invalidates the concepts of day and night. The cursory nod to so-called “intersex” conditions is simply a way to justify the appropriation of the DSD concept and terminolgy of “assigned (sex) at birth,” as if doctors and midwives attending births have to guess at a newborn’s sex, decide arbitrarily, or flip a coin and write down M or F based solely on heads or tails.
The only reason I can see is that people want to pretend that it’s just a “natural biological fact” that people can’t do whatever thing they want to do, when what they mean is “don’t do that” or “its wrong to do that.” People want you to call a blastocyst a baby because they want to make abortion illegal. People who call BLM protestors “thugs” do so because they oppose BLM. If that’s not you, then what is your reason? I think you could pick a better fight.
This isn’t the winning argument you think it is.
I’ll accept that those who are so keen to change the definition of “woman” to include men want to use this new, idiosyncratic, and counterintuitive definition to do something that the customary, standard one would prohibit, things that would normally be met with “don’t do that,” or “it’s wrong to do that.” So what is it that men want to do in women’s single-sex spaces? It’s a hell of a lot more than “just go pee.” Male sex offenders aren’t suddenly discovering they’re “trans” just to go pee. Mediocre male athletes aren’t jumping to women’s leagues just to “go pee.” This deliberate trivialization and minimization of trans identified males demand to “just go pee” hides the real, brutal cost that women are already paying for accepting these newly-minted “women” who are men int their spaces. This is not accidental. The issue is much more than “bathroom bills,” but women’s real, legitimate concerns are brushed aside as outdated prudery, or vindictive bigotry. Attemps to fight against opportunistic distortion of language is painted as pettifogging bookishness. It’s just one little word: woman. How does expanding the meaning of one little word hurt anybody? I’ll tell you how. How can women defend their rights in law if the law doesn’t know what a woman is.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany […]
I am currently reading Linsey McGoey’s The Unknowers, on the value of “strategic ignorance” to the the wealthy and powerful. It’s mind blowing in a way; I had never thought of ignorance as a weapon in the way described in the book. Think plausible deniability on steroids. Think 2008 financial crisis, the Grenfell fire, global warming and all the other environmental problems we face, think coming resource shortages.
I am only a few chapters in, so won’t attempt a summary. But this being the blog it is, I thought I could mention a couple of examples from the book: Treating women as not being important, to the point that they and their contributions are totally forgotten.
Take Milton Friedman. He won the 1976 Nobel memorial prize in economics (not an actual Nobel prize, mind you), in large part based on his book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. His book? Well, he happened to have a co-author named Anna Schwartz. Never heard of her? Me neither. According to the book, “Friedman himself acknowledged that Schwartz was an equal partner in the writing of their masterpiece.” Oh well – she’s just a woman, so what’s the big deal?
Next up, Adam Smith and On Liberty. Again, Smith acknowledged the contribution of his co-author Harriet Taylor, both in the essay itself and even more so in his autobiography. Still, it was published in his name only, and only his name is now associated with this work. I suppose that is just how things were in those days, but still …
Finally, an anecdote from other sources: When Swedish mathematician Gustav Mittag-Leffler learned that the Nobel prize was going to be awarded to Pierre Curie for their work on radioactivity, he stepped in and informed the committee in clear language that Marie Curie (full name Marie Salomea Skłodowska–Curie) deserved the prize in equal measure, for this was an equal collaboration between the two of them. Fortunately, the committee listened, and they received the prize jointly. So hiding the women doesn’t always work. But assistance from well connected and highly regarded men is sometimes necessary.
In this thread, JKR says: “I’m reading the transcript of the tribunal of Mermaids v LGB Alliance. It’s a bit mind-blowing, seeing some of the answers set down in black and white. 1/”
and she’s right. She gives examples.
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1618916080298381319
Below is a link to a clip from a very nice performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. The soprano is Elijah McCormack. She has a lovely voice and is a skilled singer.
https://youtu.be/Zv03N41KNjo
She also claims to be a he. The WaPo article where I found the link to the clip says:
Given the severe effects of testosterone on voices, I suspect she has not gone in for hormone treatments. I wonder if other women-who-claim-to-be-men choose to forgo the (desired) effects of testosterone treatment in order to preserve a singing voice.
There are a small number of adult men with soprano voices. They are sometimes called sopranists, in particular by those who take care to differentiate the voice from that of a countertenor, who is often a falsettist. Wikipedia suggests that they may owe their unusually high voices to endocrinology or to an underdeveloped larynx. Notable male sopranos include Robert Crowe and Michael Maniaci.
It would be perhaps ironic if women started being included in the tiny list of “male sopranos” simply by declaring themselves men.
That is very nice.
Also interesting.
I’ll just leave this here. I expect I’ll be doing this a lot in the future.
https://twitter.com/purleeze/status/1619096230566531073?s=20
Video from the Transpositions book launch I went to a while ago. There are some names and faces you will know among the speakers and a live musical performance by Menno!
I haven’t watched it yet. Moley says the sound isn’t great (the venue’s fault, I think, it was a bit echoey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2ll4azjOW4
A thread with stats on “gender diverse” prisoners in the Canadian prison service.
https://twitter.com/WomenReadWomen/status/1619188707298521089
Some “highlights”:
The report is here: https://www.csc-scc.gc.ca/research/005008-r442_E-en.shtml
Harald @166,
I think you mean John Stuart Mill and On Liberty (unless you’re referring to two different books).
Hi there, I expect someone here will be able to turn this up–can anyone locate/provide a link to that exchange where PZ Myers claimed there were five (seven?) sexes of horse, and listed various terms for different kinds of horses, and the respondent pointed out that each of these terms described either a male or a female horse?
Guest (#174), that would be this one…
It would! Thank you.
I see that LGB Alliance has the tribunal transcript.
It’s going to be quite the read, I expect.
Serious allegations against Dan Muscato.
https://twitter.com/ripx4nutmeg/status/1620850931389861890
And a reminder of some of his other unsavoury activities:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/danielle-muscato-grifter-supreme
I wonder whether PZ will mention this. I just checked and he’s blogged about 2 American Atheist board members who have sexual allegations against them…
I await developments. Thanks for the alert!
Wow. I’m not surprised, based on what I’ve seen of Dave/Danielle, but this is new information, thanks. I just saw the business about the two American Atheist board members ousted.
“Danielle” and I have (or had) at least one mutual FB friend, and one (female) told him he was more of a woman than she was, in a thread I saw on her page several years ago.
What a Maroon @173,
Duh, you’re right. (Egg on my face.) I was mixing up names because the book I was reading also discussed Adam Smith. Apparently, he was not quite the laissez-faire advocate that present day libertarians make him out to be. On the contrary, he argued strongly for government regulation of business, to curb and control the natural consequences of human greed. But that part has largely been excised from many editions of The wealth of nations.
Watch Nicola Sturgeon trying with all her might to avoid calling the rapist either him or her in response to being asked whether he should be considered a woman.
https://twitter.com/mar2vickers/status/1621139392499965954
Good god.
I’m well aware that Tom Jones has a reputation as a real ladykiller, but come on now.
Tom Jones: Delilah banned for choirs at Principality Stadium – (BBC)
It’s the lowest-hanging fruit that gets picked first…
Gotta disagree with you on this one. It is about a sexually jealous man murdering a woman. They don’t sing songs about lynching before football matches do they?
Delilah? I had no idea. None. I’ve never paid any attention to the lyrics. It’s got an irritating tune and a catchy refrain, but that’s all the notice I ever took. Wow.
I’ve been listening to Unsafe Space – astonishingly, on the BBC. How long before the cult clamours to have it deleted, I wonder? It is a (mildly amusing, occasionally hilarious) poke at a wide range of ‘woke’ issues. Each episode is around half an hour, and is available online at the above link immediately after the broadcast is finished. The episodes are broadcast on Thursdays at 23:00 UTC.
The latest Mess We’re In (podcast by Arty, Graham Linehan and Helen Staniland) is particularly good. There’s a lot of interesting discussion and the guest is the woman who was assaulted at the Newcastle Let Women Speak event, who is also very good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZXSBjmy7NQ
Thank you, latsot! I was searching YouTube earlier to see if there was a new one (it feels like months since the last) and got side-tracked watching Arty Morty’s interview of Shape Shifter (very good). I just decided to have a quick look here to see if there are any new comments before renewing my search, to find that you have posted the link!
tigger @ 187 – same. I knew it as an intensely annoying hard-to-ignore song with the repeated “why why whyyyyyyyyyyyyy Deeeliiiiiiilah” and nothing else. I looked it up after reading J.A.’s post. Oh how sweet, yet another extra-popular song that’s about murdering a woman.
Salman Rushdie has a new book out. Looks intriguing.
Victory City
Decades ago, if I had claimed that originalist judges would rule that the government can’t convict an abuser who agreed in his restraining order not to own guns and then was found in possession of guns, because dudes in 1789 didn’t think abusive husbands should have their guns taken away, I would have been accused of strawmanning.
And yet…. two Trump appointees (and one of Reagan’s shittier ones) just said pretty much that.
I just… Why? Why would any sane person suggest this?
“Gestational Donation”, aka, “Let’s get women to volunteer as baby incubators if they ever end up in a persistent vegetative state.”
I read Daily Kos; it sometimes has good material. It is just awful on gender identity ideology, though, and this article was astoundingly bad.
Trump proposes genocidal national ban on transgender existence if he wins 2024
They imply, with analogies to the Holocaust, that trans-identified people will be rounded up and killed. Nothing of the sort has been suggested; people have disagreed with gender identity ideology, including saying that people who identify as the opposite sex are not in face the opposite sex, and this view is described as an attempt to “define transgender people out of existence”, therefore genocide. That’s not genocide, that’s disagreement. It’s like disagreeing that Jews are the Chosen People, that there are no Chosen People, therefore Jews are not what they claim they are. It doesn’t kill anyone who claims to be part of the Chosen People, it just says they’re wrong.
Beyond that, I think the article exemplifies some of the kinds of discussion difficulties that have been brought up here. The author and people quoted in it say that doctors, rather than politicians, should decide what constitutes proper medical care for trans-identified people, but the problem is they only talk about doctors who have been swallowed by the ideology; they think their side constitutes the evidence-based, settled science.
The bullet points listed from Trump’s rant (I haven’t listened, but I think everything he says is a rant, so no quibble there) are:
1. Pass a bill that falsely claims there are only two genders, male and female
2. Reverse legislation for life-saving gender affirming healthcare
3. Ban all education of transgender and non-binary issues in schools nationwide
4. Ban transitioning for youth nationwide
5. Sign an executive order to end programs for gender transitioning for all ages nationwide
6. Criminalize and hunt doctors and educators who try to save transgender and non-binary lives
Obviously the framing is incorrect, but the only one I think I’d oppose is number 6. Number 3 might be a problem if the education they were talking about was critical of these issues, focusing instead on how to avoid social contagion and on biological reality, but you know that isn’t what they’re talking about.
It is just awful having to defend proposals from any right-wing demagogue who happened to be correct in one area, but when that demagogue is Trump, it’s worse. I wish the leftist writers at Daily Kos could see, at the very least, that there is legitimate disagreement here, that people on the left also disagree, and that maybe they should examine their own positions a little.
Just a quick note that the Let Women Speak event at noon today in Glasgow (the one with the furries) will be livestreamed on Kelly-Jay Keen’s YouTube channel. Livestreamers will probably be able to see and hear more than those of us who’ll be there.
There’s also an overhead and far away webcam showing the square, which is good because from overhead and far away is my best side.
https://www.glasgow.gov.uk/forms/webcam/Webcam.aspx
There are at least three women intending to talk about same-sex care for disabled women, which is especially important and topical in the UK right now. And, of course, there will be much talk of rapists in women’s prisons.
Lots of big gender critical names will be there. It should be a good one.
@tigger_the_wing #188: It appears to be gone, assuming nothing went wrong when you copied and pasted in the link you posted.
My apologies, it seems that the Beeb doesn’t like hyperlinks. It won’t work for me, either, although the link has copied and pasted without errors and works when typed in. Try copying this link and pasting it into the address bar:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gx1z/episodes/player
Ah, it was only an extra quote character at the end of the address. Remove it, and it works. (Ophelia, feel free to fix the link in #188 and delete this post and the previous one. But who am I to tell you to feel free to do what you want on your own blog?)
Heh, no no, I do want to be told when it’s fine to delete something.
Sure enough, fixed.
Maybe I’ll remove all these later. Maybe not. They’re part of history!
Thank you, Ophelia!
Happy to dalling!
Hmm, for some reason I did not see #198 when I posted #199, so the latter post may seem a bit odd. But anyhow, it all works out in the end.
Quote from Facebook: “Spare me your revisionist dogma” (this in response to the use of “CE” in lieu of “AD”).
My question for the peanut gallery: can dogma be revisionist? And can revisionism be dogmatic?
I’ve been mitigating the boredom of being stuck in bed by listening to Queens Speech podcasts on YouTube again, and I though that you might be interested in this segment which seems to discuss the origins of the plea from the defence of Adam Graham for mitigation because of his sudden claim to womanhood, more than a month before it actually happened. I’m linking to the start of the segment here:
https://youtu.be/dGJIDoYZbXU&t=3240
From James: https://twitter.com/JamesEsses/status/1622567270697279491?t=A6c-I7uIBXpxQNNXlQ8fKA&s=19
The petition is here: https://petitions.ourcommons.ca/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-4268
I bet old boundary-breaking Trudeau would just love that. What a way to show, and be lauded for, his commitment to the marginalised and oppressed whilst actually giving everything to white men.
Here’s a very worthwhile read that Jane Clare Jones made available last week. It’s a PDF that can be downloaded and then read, and covers the recent discussion that revolved around feminism and whether or not the gender-critical movement is being co-opted by the right for it’s own purposes. IMO, I think that’s a valid concern and the essays in this publication all have something important to say about it.
Link: https://theradicalnotion.org/gender-critical-disputes/
Light-hearted post from Graham Linehan’s Substack:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/maam-i-am
That’s brilliant.
#168 Sackbut, how could you doubt the manliness of that singer? Did you not notice the shaved head, or the absence of a dress? Open your eyes!
___
I read a post made by PZ, “Uteruses are scary, so protect them!” Despite the silly name, he is commenting on a very serious blog post written by a Bess Kalb here.
The weirdest thing about the post? PZ was actually the only one to mention women. He closed his post with “Those vile right-wingers who claim to be pro-life are wrecking medical education, shackling doctors’ hands, and condemning women to death. Don’t let them get away with it.” By contrast, Bess’s post avoids the word like the plague, using silly constructions instead: pregnant people of course, but also ‘those of us in stirrups’ and ‘untold Americans’.
She even says (emphasis added) “When Senator Lindsey Graham showed his hand and proposed a national abortion ban, he condemned an entire population…” What’s the population? For fuck sake, name it! She knows very well that the population is women. The right hates women, but she just refuses to say so and so becomes a stooge of the right by covering for them.
how is that Charlie Hebdo earthquake-in-Turkey cover supposed to be read?
https://twitter.com/Charlie_Hebdo_/status/1622642527235866633
“même pas besoin d’envoyer de chars” (= “not even need to send tanks”)
why does “tanks” occur at all?
is it referencing that sending of tanks to Ukraine?
if so, in what way?
in this way? https://www.brusselstimes.com/360002/france-hesitates-in-sending-its-own-leclerc-tanks-to-ukraine
is it actually criticizing the French government?
IPSO finally launches a public consultation on reporting sex and gender identity:
https://www.ipso.co.uk/news-press-releases/press-releases/ipso-launches-public-consultation-on-draft-guidance-on-the-reporting-of-sex-and-gender-identity/
@Holms #212,
Such inclusive, non-degrading language. So much not reducing people to their biological functions.
More gun insanity, this time in Missouri.
At least there’s one semi-sane Republican in Missouri.
The “logic” behind voting against the ban:
Soon they will be repealing age limits for buying alcohol and cigarettes in Missouri. After all, they don’t harm you if you don’t drink or smoke them.
(Random linguistic fact: Turkish uses the same verb–içmek–for drinking and smoking. You drink cigarettes in Turkish.)
I *once again* failed to meet Maria in Glasgow.
It’s annoying, we keep being in the same places but I’ve never been able to say hi.
This is really good, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh4QdPUPgoI&t=3s
Thanks for the video, latsot!
Oh look, here’s a suggestion for a massive engineering project to “ease global warming.”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2358603-launching-a-huge-dust-cloud-from-the-moon-could-ease-global-warming/
How well does an engineering approach work on political/economic/biological/geophysical problems? Can you say “unintended consequences?” Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.
At least they’re saying we should still be cutting our CO2 emissions (though there will be some who would use this sort of scheme to carry on as usual. Why change your diet when there are antacids?):
I’m not an engineer, just a jumped-up mechanic; so I can’t do the maths required for such an undertaking. But, it seems to me from observing other planets in our own solar system, that such a cloud would make a near-invisible ring around the equator until it fell into the gravity well of either the Moon or the Earth, and cut out an insignificant amount of sunlight. 1.8% reduction seems a tad ambitious, for a project which would dump an enormous amount of additional, avoidable, greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere and could add a catastrophic wobble to the Moon’s orbit. Why not simply plant a lot more trees? Or stop building in swamps, so they can absorb carbon? Or paint the roof of every structure white?
From my understanding of the idea put forward in the article, what they’re proposing is to situate the dust cloud at the L1 Lagrange point, rather than in Earth orbit. Dust particles stay in the desired spot for approximately five days before dispersal by solar wind. So the idea is to use rail guns to launch a constant stream of dust from the Moon, keeping it replenished long enough to achieve the “desired” effect. Of course the resources required to build the infrastructure to establish and maintain such a capability would be massive.
Emphasis added.
Here’s my fear of the “antacid” approach put into words. If we can just keep spraying dust into space to cool the planet, we can just keep doing what we’re doing. I could see Koch money getting behind that.
Trees and whitewash?! Who’s going to watch a movie about planting and painting? Where’s the manly, heroic Big Engineering buzz in that? Killjoy!
Seriously, one could plant a lot of trees and paint a lot of roofs for the biliions to trillions of dollars such a scheme would take. I wonder if anyone’s done the math to calculate the temperature decrease that approach would produce? And, it would be better than than the one-size-fits-all shade the whole damn planet dust cloud exercise. And trees would actually extract CO2, reducing the amount already in the atmosphere. White rooftops aren’t going to be robbing anyone of sunlight. My guess is that the risk of unintended consequences for this approach is much lower than that of Operation Pigpen. Better still, all it takes are shovels and paint, and could be started tomorrow, instead of in years or decades, years or decades we can’t really afford. I say we direct a few billion (or trillion) dollars into Tigger’s Reforestry and Rooftop Albedo Augmentation Project (or TRRAAP-What’s an ambitious (even if low tech) geoengineering plan without an acronym?)!
I laughed at TRRAAP – I could even imagine it being said in the voice of the Disney cartoon Tigger!
None of that is an original idea of mine, just a culmination of all I have read on the subject as written by other people. As you say, it’s low-tech, cheap, we already have all the materials to hand, and every able-bodied human can do their part.
No heroes, no futuristic inventions, no loud noises (although I suppose they’d be quiet on the Moon).
So not remotely glamorous.
I was just checking to see whether PZ had blogged about the sexual abuse allegations against Dan Muscato (do you really need a spoiler?) and saw this:
This is what drives me crazy. We know PZ doesn’t believe that. We know that he’s pandering to what remains of his horde, for reasons that escape me entirely. I don’t even care about the why any more; HOW is a formerly principled man able to live with himself, lying like this?
I couldn’t, the guilt would eat me.
The last time I could bear to look at his blog through splayed fingers he still hadn’t written anything much about men in women’s sports. Just completely ignored the subject, as though it doesn’t exist. This, for me, was the final clinching proof that he doesn’t believe a word of what he says, any more. I haven’t seen him write a word about men in women’s prisons, either, although I can’t bring myself to pay much attention.
Hilariously, though, he wrote this very recently:
This is terrible. A young transgender woman was stabbed to death in the UK a few days ago- a heartbreaking tragedy.
Now extremist trans activists like Gretchen Felker-Martin are using this terrible event to advocate violence:
Blood on Jessie Singal’s hands, blood on Helen Joyce’s, Rowling’s, every just-asking-questions journalist and fear-mongering TERFs. You’re scared for your children? They’re killing ours….If they all had one throat, man.
https://archive.is/pqs71#selection-903.0-903.32
It just gets worse. Somebody told GFM that police are saying the tragic stabbing of Brianna Ghey was *not* a hate crime. GFM responded:
“You wanna drink cop piss, be my guest.”
https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1625333225299083264
Another GFM tweet includes a violent fantasy about torturing/killing journalist Jesse Singal.
Police are not currently treating it as a hate crime. But if they’re wrong and he was killed because he was trans, then I’ll be among the first to condemn it and count it among the verified stats of trans people being murdered for being trans. Wouldn’t everyone?
It throws the asymmetry between murders of men and women into sharp relief like nothing else.
I didn’t tweet about it at all because this is the murder of a teenager by (likely) other teenagers. The political discussions and implications should be about violence and probably not identity and the friends and family mourning seemed more important than either. But I had to change my mind when the inevitable happened and the gender people started saying the murder was blood on gender critical hands. I could accept such lies if nothing much were at stake. As it stands, I can’t.
As of Tuesday, Cheshire Police have about the Brianna Ghey case :
“All lines of inquiry are being explored, including whether this was a hate crime.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/14/brianna-ghey-killing-being-investigated-as-possible-transphobic-hate
I don’t think it’s just the horde he’s pandering to. I think it’s also his fan base at his school. He’s already pretty much made himself public enemy #1 to the right wingers on campus; he can’t afford to piss off the woke.
Not too long ago I posted here about an opera singer, a woman who claims to be a man, who has a lovely and skilled soprano voice. I speculated that she wasn’t taking testosterone.
Today I came across this 2019 NYT article about transgender-identifying opera singers in general:
Transgender Opera Singers Find Their Voices
It addresses that point, saying that testosterone “lowers and alters the voice”, and that “Estrogen does not raise the voice the way testosterone lowers it”. One of the women profiled in the article went from mezzo-soprano to tenor; a male baritone, on the other hand, retained his baritone voice.
The baritone plays male roles in the opera; he’s “made peace with it”. Huh. A man pretending to be a woman pretending to pretend to be a man.
Meta meta meta meta meta
He should play Rosalind.
I just have to vent, I had a homework assignment on the COVID vaccine, and students (not all of them, not even most, but enough to enrage me) are taking it as a chance to make an anti-vax statement, which can be read by all the others. One even posted a link to infowars on the post of a student who stated there is no evidence of severe harm from the vaccine.
I am so glad I am retiring!
fuming
Nicola Sturgeon has resigned.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/15/uk/nicola-sturgeon-resigns-scotland-intl/index.html
Wo!
I was reading an interesting opinion piece at Religion News Service:
The ‘He Gets Us’ Super Bowl ads brought back bad memories
Kirsten Powers recounts how she was suckered into an evangelical movement that hid their donors and hid the real doctrine they were promoting.
This kind of approach seems almost too common these days, but among the parallels that come to my mind is transgender ideology activism. I think Powers does a good job explaining the tactics and the problems they cause.
Really liked Matt Yglesias post on the modern media landscape. This is really a “you need to read the whole thing” piece, but I’ll try to pull a few key points:
Screechy M., I think the audience isn’t the variable here – there’s always been a mix of critical and credulous consumers of news. What’s changed is the medium. Instead of newspapers and three nightly news broadcasts on TV like we had during most of the 20th century, we now have the internet as the primary medium that provides news for more and more people, and as Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message”, or to put it more clearly, the medium is more important than the message itself. Twitter is the most prominent example of how the medium shapes discourse, and in particular allows for the propagation of half-baked bullshit at the speed of light across the world as well as enable a relative few true-believing activists to shape the message being sent.
So about “mainstream” outlets controlling news and such, what the internet is also allowing people to do is control their own consumption and bind themselves up into their own little cozy nutshells of thought. Historian Tony Judt in his last interview stated that he didn’t mind being cancelled by some of the media over his criticism of Israel, but that what bothered him was the closing of the Jewish mind to debate itself. We’re also seeing this in the ongoing row over transgender issues, with #nodebate being used to shut down discussion because, shut up that’s why.
So now as Twitter is having troubles under Elon I’m seeing those on the further left migrate to Mastodon, which is tailor made to silo people into their own little agreeable corners of social media and getting to have two-minute hate toots over J.K. Rowling practically daily. These aren’t stupid people though, they’re just committed to a side and thanks to highly motivated reasoning by god they’re going to stick to it. It’s ironic to say the least that so many skeptics from back twenty years ago now are doing their utmost to uphold the religion of gender identity.
Yglesias is someone I’ve read since the days of the blog Pandagon and he’s had an interesting career arc and is a clever thinker. He’s not, however, a very deep thinker and his take on the media is pretty superficial. It’s not the news audience that’s changed, it’s the medium that features TikTok as a major source of news for millions. Yes, newspapers weren’t perfect back then but the standards of traditional 20th century journalism were far, far better than what we have today online.
J.A.,
I think Yglesias’s point is not that the audience has changed. It’s that changes in technology have led to a proliferation of media sources, which has allowed more choice, which (while being in many respects a good thing) has allowed the audience to indulge its already-existing-but-heretofore-unsatisfied preferences for things other than merely accurate information, i.e. reinforcement of one’s views, outrage.
People weren’t nobler or better news consumers decades ago, they just didn’t have a wide range of options. Most people got their news from one of three national tv newscasts, one of at most two local newspapers, and perhaps a local radio station, and/or a national news magazine like Time or Newsweek. Because each of those outlets was competing for pretty much every consumer, they tended to all aim for a middle of the road approach, which frustrated some people but their only real option was to subscribe to Mother Jones or the National Review or read the local “alternative” newspaper to supplement their news diet.
Now local news is dying or dead, there’s a proliferation of national and international news and opinion sources which are happy to capture 10% of the audience, so they can specialize in ideological niches that get small but intense fan bases.
This seems like an extraordinary thing for a prominent barrister to say. As much because it’s very obviously nowhere near as plausibly deniable as he seems to think as because it really does seem to be condoning violent acts. I wonder if Maugham believes his own hype.
https://twitter.com/Sadbh73286087/status/1625998797183614977
On another note, I was out of contact yesterday when Sturgeon resigned and my phone nearly melted with notifications when I turned it back on. I had that feeling unique to people living in these times; dread that I’d either said something really good or really, really bad.
Thanks, latsot. That’s almost unbelievable behaviour, like that of White.
I have to wonder why pro-MRA/TRA barristers seem so determined to go down with the ship. Their attachment to the fantasy seems to have made them think that they are untouchable, when – surely! – Sturgeon’s loss of position should have disabused them of that notion.
P.Z. Myers decides to challenge Tomas Bogardus over whether sex is a social construct or not. If childish insults are any indication, Myers lost the argument.
https://twitter.com/pzmyers/status/1625989800875659266
Urgh. That’s a painful read.
Funny that I linked a Matt Yglesias piece earlier this week, because now he’s gone one out on trans issues.
It’s pretty close to my own position, which I suspect will please few of the active participants in these debates (but is a pretty mainstream position — he has a talent for finding controversial “normie” takes on issues!) Yglesias already attracts a fair amount of hate among progressives, but I wonder if he’s ready for what’s about to be unleashed on him.
Democrats are in a bad place with respect to gender ideology, and Republicans are going to take advantage of it. Trans activists meanwhile will also slam any Democrat who dares to question trans dogma, and as Democrats need younger progressive voters who have bought into said gender ideology I don’t see how Democrats can do what Yglesias suggests in his piece. There’s a mainstream position to be sure, but politically it’s not viable I’m afraid,
Eh, I don’t buy this notion that Democratic politicians are totally captured by the activist left, on this or any other issue.
Certain activists also “slammed” any Democratic politician who didn’t endorse “defunding the police,” but that didn’t deter the overwhelming majority of Dems from backing away from that slogan because they correctly perceived that the public wasn’t with the activists on this one. It was the few politicians who went the other way who mostly ended up paying a political price, e.g. Mandela Barnes, who may have lost the WI-SEN race because some of his 2020-era statements made him vulnerable.
Today is the first day of hearing in the case of Tickle v Giggle, where @salltweets is being forced to defend her women only app from male predators like “Roxy Tickle”.
https://twitter.com/Chr1sinAus/status/1626334271366660096?s=20
I wonder if he’s bringing the case simply to have that title forever in the annals of court history. It’s bound to be a future quiz answer!
No surprise here, but Fox knew.
Even Rupert Murdoch knew that those claims were bullshit.
Hannity and Ingraham, too. But it was more important to pander to their idiot viewers.
And now they’re crying “freedom of the press”.
And hey, it might have been true.
Although Hannity isn’t having it.
So much of PZ Myers’ response to Tomas Bogardus here is not even wrong:
“Sex evolves” is saying what? Not that the phenomenon of sex itself changes – there are still two of them enabling the recombination of genes. As far as complexities, like I suppose secondary sex characteristics, sexual behaviors involved with mating, raising of offspring, etc. go, they’re not really a part of sex itself, they’re things that have emerged from it. Then, saying that yeast having a sexual “identity” is ludicrous. Identity isn’t something yeast can think about, and trying to locate it to a single gene is just a silly assertion Myers seemingly thinks is being made by Bogardus. What Bogardus I believe is saying in step #3 is that the phenomenon of sex (and sexual reproduction) predates the notion of sex being a social construct. So what we may think about sex is one thing, but sex clearly exists outside the human conception of it. IMO, the claim “sex is a social construct” is just a sneaky way to support the claim that men can be women because what we think about sex is what defines sex. (That is what I believe philosophers call a category error, aka a real howler.) FWIW, I am neither a biologist or a philosopher, but I do my best to think critically anyway so feel free to chime in and help me out if you like.
He’s sounding an awful lot like a gender-critical feminist there. Hasn’t that been part of the feminist argument for, I dunno, forever? And yet when Bruce Jenner puts on makeup and a dress, the response isn’t “What a brave man!”, but “You look mahvelous, girl!”
This is Roxy Tickle, the “woman” who is suing @Salltweets for denying “her” access to Giggle, a female only app.
https://twitter.com/Sorelle_Arduino/status/1626483704041201665?s=20
So I had to fill out a firearms transfer form recently, and the sex section had three options. One would think that it would be in the national interest to gather accurate statistics regarding fucking weaponry that can kill people from a mile away, but maybe I’m just old fashioned.
I think conservatives are beginning to get what the difference is between “gender affirming” and “sex change” is and are passing legislation with that in mind.
Utah Becomes Sixth State to Protect Minors from Experimental ‘Gender Transition’ Procedures
Meanwhile, liberals are hoping to pass gender-affirming legislation elsewhere.
MN bill aims to create legal refuge for trans youth seeking gender-affirming care
Blurring the distinction between gender and sex isn’t doing kids any favors though.
JA, PZ has demonstrated for years that he is no longer capable of addressing sex as a concept without entangling it with social perceptions, except where the organism is not human. Mentions of sex when talking about his spiders or other non-humans, and he will happily speak of physical markers as proof of sex. Switch to humans, and suddenly it’s all sorts of po-mo ‘social perceptions are inextricably linked to the thing itself’ bullshit.
Another person in a progressive group’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” effort caught pretending to be something she is not.
The Intercept: Progressive Group Roiled by Accusations Diversity Leader Misrepresented Her Ethnic Background
The article uses this case as a springboard to a brief discussion of problems in the diversity industry.
Holms, PZ has demonstrated for years that when he’s losing the argument his go to move is essentially “fuck you, that’s why”, followed by blocking the person he’s arguing with and then strawmanning them. It’s really quite unprofessional behavior, and would get him in real trouble outside the blogo/twittter sphere.
As for Bogardus, he’s continuing the argument sans PZ, and continuing to make good points with others who want to claim that sex is a social construct:
https://twitter.com/TomasBogardus/with_replies
[…] J.A. alerted us to a back and forth between a philosopher and a biologist a few days ago. Here’s how it ended on day one: […]
Someone is attempting to remove Susie Green’s despicable TED Talk from the internet. However, it has been preserved.
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/where-did-susie-greens-ted-talk-go/comments
Scottie Andrew (she/her) of CNN joins in the JKR bashing and misrepresentation. >> https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/21/entertainment/jk-rowling-podcast-release-what-to-know-cec/index.html
Apologies if this has already been posted.
Thanks for the link, tigger. It led me to this very excellent takedown by Kellie-Jay Keen.
Oh, now I see who Keen is. Duh.
Ya – aka Posie Parker.
Yeah, I’m a fool. And if that last parenthetical remark in @261 magically disappeared, I wouldn’t complain.
Done.
Ta.
I believe this video is essential viewing. A gay man reads the Telegraph article about a new book, “Time to Think”, and the details of what has been going on in England are horrific.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr4DXMJJbLQ
Scotland police have withdrawn from Stonewall’s Diversity program (paywalled)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-scotland-backs-out-of-stonewall-diversity-scheme-plrw0mzx6
screenshot
https://i.redd.it/sl4i1uhltdja1.jpg
The following is taken from legislation that just passed in the Minnesota House that would ban conversion therapy:
In other words, counseling or therapy where the mental health professional seeks to discover more about the basis of their patient’s beliefs by questioning them could be judged as unlawful under this legislation. So what this legislation is also doing is making gender-identity affirmation practically a requirement on the therapist’s part based on the patient’s initial statement stating what their gender identity is. If the patient is autistic and treating that could be construed as seeking to change their gender identity, that would also be unlawful. So what this legislation is doing under the cover of banning conversion therapy is making affirmation of gender identity the only kind of therapy that mental health professionals can provide.
Of course the existence of gender de-transitioners ought to be something that legislators should ask about and discuss/debate, and I hope for that to happen when the Minnesota Senate hears this bill. I would think there’s at least one Republican in the MN Senate who can bring that subject up, but gender critical thinking isn’t the GOPs strong suit given their culture war tendencies. Oh well.
Affirmation Generation, the documentary film, was put up on Vimeo but pulled shortly afterwards. It’s currently on The Distance, and I watched it and it is very good, very sad, and very necessary.
https://www.thedistancemag.com/p/affirmation-generation-the-lies-of
Owen Jones’ single brain cell fired earlier.
https://twitter.com/annLorryone/status/1628536493177176065
Forgive me for the personal anecdote, but an idea which has been floating around in my brain finally coalesced into words just now, and I realised that negative emotions – anger, sadness, frustration, bitterness, etc. – require a lot of energy for the brain to process, and so chronic low oxygen levels are actually helping me to be a calm, placid, content person, accepting of my current lot in life. As long as O₂ levels stay at 90% or above, no organ damage will occur, and, like a fœtus, I’ll just remain curled up and happy. Well, not quite – I still have to get up to get dressed, go to the bathroom, do the feline-related chores, etc. And, unlike a fœtus, I have access to the internet and a Nintendo Switch. And on Really Excellent Days*, when I actually have some energy, I get out and about and have fun just not being in bed, so that keeps me happy, too.
Carry on!
(*Good Day = A day where I wake up. Better Day = A day where I manage to visit the rest of the house. Really Excellent Day = A day when I manage to leave the house for something other than a doctor’s appointment. There are in-between states, but I won’t bore you with those)
Uneasy at the Grey Lady:
https://wapo.st/3korgLN
I saw this in a meme shared publicly on Facebook, by someone who was not the author. I don’t know the author. I suspect it’s from Twitter.
It’s not in the least important for MTG to learn to use makeup, nor how to act in a manner consistent with oppressive stereotypes of women. The very idea that MTG would improve in some manner by doing these things is sexist. The meme implies that these men are better “women” than MTG, and this is somehow an insult.
And drag queens are men. I don’t think all, or even many, claim to be women, except perhaps when doing their shows. Many have other lives, other names. They know they are not women, they are acting.
I really dislike defending MTG, but I think she’s in the right on this one thing, and I think the attack on her is an example of why.
Peter Goers is an Adelaide gadfly, scribbler, and broadcaster. He has a weekly column in a Murdoch paper and a daily radio show on the national broadcaster.
Some years ago, about the time of “Sing Along Sound of Music”, he caused a stir by declaring it the one movie where the audience cheers for the NAZIs to win.
Now, he has rewritten the much-loved Beatrix Potter’s “Tale of Peter Rabbit”. I commend it to all, and post in full as otherwise behind a paywall.
Peter Goers has been a mainstay of the South Australian arts and media scene for decades. He is the host of The Evening Show on ABC Radio Adelaide and has been a Sunday Mail columnist since 1991.
That is an amusing rewrite, thanks.
This:
“Moby Dick is in big trouble. Them/they will be Moby Gender-Neutral Biological Genital Object.”
reminds me that I saw a comedy clip recently in which the comic suggested that, in a “woke” version of Moby Dick, the whale would be non-binary and named Maybe Dick.
lol
I love both of those Moby Dick renamings.
Yesterday’s Queen’s Speech with Clive and Dennis is worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nMAQ1SYM8Q
I have never been a fan of Dilbert comics, but this is an interesting revelation >>
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/25/business/dilbert-comic-strip-racist-tirade/index.html
Wow, Twiliter, that’s quite amazing; and explains the weird Dilbert cartoon (with a red cat and the character in a KKK costume being told he’s fired) circulating on Facebook.
Another person’s job lost because he tweeted support for JK Rowling.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/music-company-co-founder-announces-departure-showcasing-support-for-j-k-rowling-deeply-saddened
It is often said here that people are in favour of self-id laws up until the question is broken down into more detailed questions, e.g. ‘are you in favour of self-id if it permits untransitioned males entry to women’s changing rooms?’ – or however the wording is. I’m sure you know what I mean. Anyway, can anyone link to that please?
Here you are, Holms:
https://www.womenarehuman.com/scottish-polls-confirm-public-does-not-support-self-id/
An absolutely dreadful article in “The Baffler” magazine has appeared, written by a Scott Branson.
It’s a long pseudo-leftist complaint about the “social order”, and “the family”, and the “anti-trans movement”.
the actual aim of the anti-trans movement..is about consolidating state control along the line of property rights. Gender is a form of discipline, the outcome of violence, both historical and contemporary, no matter the form it takes; we might even call normative parenting a form of grooming.
https://archive.is/hxfeH#selection-599.0-607.0
You don’t say.
I’m sure many modern parents would have no problem with their children being gay, or bisexual, or being gender non-conforming; they merely want them to wait until they are of legal adult age before doing activities like having sex ( consensual, straight or gay) or dressing like, or medically transitioning to the opposite gender. Nothing to do with “state control” or “property rights”.
Scott Branson is not happy with the Grey Lady:
…look at the New York Times for their latest in a long line of surreptitious anti-trans opinion pieces, where “reasonable” critiques of transition are aired. Even when the editorial board was confronted by a group of contributing writers with a letter detailing the violent damage that their articles, which pose as objective while platforming anti-trans talking points, they simply responded with a defense of the notorious celebrity transphobe, J.K. Rowling, and a misleading conflation of the concerned writers with the media-monitoring group GLAAD. This lays the groundwork for anti-trans fascism.
“”Fascism”. You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means. ”
A newspaper publishing a few articles that disagree with Branson’s extremist views on the family, the state and transgender issues does not “lay the groundwork” for a violent ultra-nationalist political movement of any kind.
Poor, deluded, men who think that they can be turned into women.
Some of them come so close to understanding the objection to the mantra ‘TWAW’, but can’t quite manage to join the dots. Their narcissism gets in the way.
https://feminuremberg.com/video.php?v=143
From Branson’s essay:
The problem with this claim is that children are not little adults. There are things they cannot comprehend about sexuality as they’re not able to experience it as adults do. That’s why we have so-called “age appropriate” sex ed in schools.
That said, I deeply distrust a movement that seeks to sexualize children for their own ends while speciously claiming it’s also for the good of gays and women. That kind of forced teaming is manipulative and dishonest.
Meanwhile, PZ Myers is having another go at arguing sex is somehow bimodal:
https://twitter.com/nathankw/status/1630556878072692737
Or should I say, having another go at obfuscating about sex somehow being bimodal. Myers must know he’s wrong about modality when it comes to sex, but is fully committed to lying about it anyway. It really is professional malfeasance on his part, being a professor of biology. If he’s teaching this in the classroom, he should be disciplined and told to cease misinforming his students.
Oh, PZ’s gone barking mad today.
So sex is a spectrum and people can literally change sex. Presumably by changing their outfits and hairstyles and announcing new pronouns. Madness.
I hadn’t paid attention to Myers in a long time. I knew he supported gender woo but I honestly didn’t expect his supposedly scientific position on the nature of biological sex to be this explicitly crazy.
https://twitter.com/pzmyers/status/1630631633815519246
By changing their outfits and hairstyles?? Tut. They have to change their mannerisms and gestures and way of talking, too.
#283
Cheers!
I saw this essay by a detransitioner on the Advocates Protecting Children web site. It’s short and personal, and it speaks to the nonsense and fragility and cognitive dissonance inherent in gender ideology. I liked it a great deal.
Gender Activists Make Everything About Trans, Even When it Conflicts with Their Own Ideology
Great essay, thank you Sackbut.
Holms, you’re welcome!
While Myers is wrong about there being more than two sexes, I think his interlocutor is wrong about modality. He seems to be claiming that categorical variables can’t be bimodal, but that’s not the case. Take party affiliation of politicians in the US—there are several categories (independent, socialist, communist, etc.), but nearly every politician is either R or D. If that’s not bimodal, then I don’t know what that term means. (In fact, I think you could even argue that a binary can be bimodal, if membership in the two categories is roughly equal.)
My apologies for being a bit late. Being sick, I lost track of time. All six episodes of the first series of Unsafe Space from BBC Radio Four are available here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gx1z/episodes/player
The format isn’t entirely to my liking (a mix of comedy sketches and short interviews, often with annoying and distracting background noise) and nor is a lot of the comedy, but some of it is hilarious (to me, you might find different joke amusing to the ones I laughed at).
What is really interesting, though, are the interviews of people on either side of an issue, especially the ‘trans’ debate. In each episode, the interviewer asks pointed and provocative questions, the ones we wish other journalists were brave enough to ask, and the interviewees on our side (such as Graham Linehan) manage to give sensible, grown-up, coherent responses. Those on the other side manage to make themselves sound utterly bonkers. They appear to be so sure that their mantra-filled, counter-factual beliefs are justified entirely by the passion with which they hold them, they entirely fail to take into account the context. Well worth a listen, although perhaps through headphones if you don’t wish to annoy other people.
Episode 1 Andrew Doyle talks to Billy Bragg
Episode 2 Andrew Doyle talks to Guardian columnist Owen Jones
Episode 3 Simon Evans discusses ‘woke poetry’
Episode 4 Andrew Doyle talks to Graham Linehan
Episode 5 Andrew Doyle talks to stand-up Eshaan Akbar
Episode 6 Simon Evans talks to jane fae of Trans Media Watch
Dear god, PZ is on a tear lately. Is the guy determined to embarrass himself? Remember, the little run of recent tweeting has been about whether there are 2 sexes or some other number, as seen here in #288 and 289.
In this blog post, he disputes the 2 sex idea with the following.
Oh. Actually, that’s better than I expected from him, I was dreading some gigantic wall of text that in no way disputes or even addresses the 2 sex idea.
…
Oh. My god. I spoke too soon-
Look at how little relevance this has to the question of whether there are two sexes. That last paragraph flails about with particular vigour, as he runs through a list of complexities as if to impress the reader with how fraught it all is. He touches on spider sexuality (not at issue), libido (not at issue), socialisation (not at issue), infertility (not at issue), and genital malformation (not at issue). Yet after entirely dodging the question at hand he has the cheek to declare that he has prevailed: “because sex, even in a small arthropod as driven by instinct as a spider, isn’t binary”. Case closed.
Except that’s only about half of the post! There is a bit more dreary question-dodging, including a convenient list of physical parameters that do not bear on the issue (“Receptivity, courtship initiation, web twanging frequency, successful insemination frequency, dancing intensity, abdomen size, interval since last courtship, metabolism levels…”). Still nothing to dispute that there are two sexes.
Oh and of course the whole thing is adorned with snide asides and petty insults. He finishes with something he seems to think is a logical trap:
Ahem. Setting aside the differences in how we frame ‘gender affirming care’, we aren’t opposed to it in adults, though I for one am not in favour of it being funded through government health care. We are opposed to it in minors*. And as sex can’t be changed, we are also against the availability of a legal process by which people can coopt the courts into pretending it can be.
*I know, this is where the TRA yells that nothing is done to minors except harmless and wholly reversible puberty blocking (despite it not being without side-effect and not being reversible), but this just isn’t true. Hospitals do perform irreversible surgeries on adolescents (1, 2 just as an appetiser – there is more reporting of this out there), yet even if this was not the case, trans-promoting organisations are campaigning to bring this about!
Surgeries on minors are already happening, and they’re pushing for more to take place.
Yikes, what a ramble! I am overdue for bed.
Thank you for that, Holms. As you point out, he is being devious and dishonest. Nobody is calling all the other stuff around sexual reproduction ‘sex’, so that’s a complete red herring.
Perhaps he would like a refresher course in logical argumentation? The point of football is to have two teams play against one another, until one team wins or the game runs out of time. Even given the fact that there are referees, spectators, different tactics in play, some matches are played on fields and others in stadia, some are televised, although most are not, etc., teams don’t wear the same colours, etc. nobody would conclude that the game is complicated so cannot be said to be played by two teams.
It’s that bad pun thing again, isn’t it?
Well, I’m set for the evening. Still too unwell to go to band practice, I’ve decided to watch Kellie-Jay in the USA – Let Women Speak.
Kevin Drum doesn’t understand the genderism issue, but he has some cogent things to say about things like social media and the “woke” viewpoint. Here he presents and comments on a good column by Matt Yglesias:
On “feeling unsafe”
Yes, exactly. Code words intended to get other people to take action, not expressions of genuine concern.
The Yglesias piece is here:
Why are young liberals so depressed?
The Kellie Jay video is much too much for me to watch at one sitting, the stories told by the brave women right from the beginning are heartbreaking.
So I have cheered myself up by watching Barry Wall enjoy the latest news from the loopier men who claim not to be men. There’s some really good news in there, namely that Titzilla is now on leave.
It’s easy to tell when PZ is losing the argument.
https://twitter.com/pzmyers/status/1631356877341614090
#299
KJK is a trooper!
I’m in Minnesota and I’m a Democrat, and I feel kind of steamrollered right now. We have a Democrat Trifecta, with the state House, the State Senate, and the governor. And they are doing many great things that have needed to be done for many years, and we’re getting caught up.
But this:
https://twitter.com/Riley_Gaines_/status/1631427562546114562?s=20
I can’t identify anyone yet that thinks that there is anything wrong with this.
Kids. Women, Gays and Lesbians. None of them matter as long as boys masquerading as girls can shove them aside.
She actually said the world is already set up for the benefit of
ciswomen. Jeeeeeez.Of course businesses are less likely to hire “they/thems.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/02/resumes-including-they/them-pronouns-are-more-likely-to-be-overlooked.html
CNBC is framing this as a human rights violation rather than good sense. Why hire somebody who’s insisting on special treatment based on nothing more than narcissism?
“Seafolly announces first ever trans ambassador”
Seafolly is a well established Australian swimwear brand, founded in Sydney over 40 years ago. It has had many “brand ambassadors” over they years, but until now, never a “Trans Ambassador”.
Seafolly has announced Deni Todorovič as its first trans ambassador.
“This week I’ve been reminded of the many complexities of living as a trans non binary person in Australia, so to have this support from a brand I’ve admired since my days at Cosmo — is a true pinch me moment,” they wrote.
Trans. Non Binary. They. Look at the photos, no doubt at all Deni’s a bloke. Sock in jocks. Manspreading. Bearded. Hirsute.
https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-style/seafolly-announces-first-ever-trans-ambassador/news-story/2c899f392e75eb4f9b3bc8b28321e50b
“I don’t need to outrun the bear, I only need to outrun you”. >> https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/bear-safety-tips-national-park-service-trnd/index.html
Never mind bespoke pronouns and cultish thinking dividing us all. I think that this little bit from Sir Ian McKellan is the perfect way people should talk to one another. No more broken men, no more women sacrificing their own safety and peace of mind trying to pick up the pieces. Just a world where everyone addresses everyone else as ‘love’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebb272kjmWQ
I really enjoyed that tigger. Thanks, love. :)
The web site is real. Jeremy Boreing is a co-founder of Daily Wire. They have a commercial about their razor products that might also be of interest. They are thumbing their noses at companies that dropped ads from Daily Wire over “values misalignment”. The “I hate …” URLs redirect to jeremysrazors.com, where you can see the commercials, various products, and other information.
Sackbut, I gather from your comment #311 that you are referring to the Jeremy’s Chocolate website referred to in this comment:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2023/how-to-poison-the-well/#comment-2982039
Yes, it’s real. I put up screenshots of the site on Facebook, in the comments of a post I made with the video. The whole ordering page is brilliant; but, much as I’d like to, I can’t justify spending so much money on chocolate which probably couldn’t be sent to me, and which I couldn’t eat even if it did arrive.
Oh, dear, did I respond to the wrong thread? My apologies.
Just came across this review of the book After Sappho in today’s print version of the Washington Post*. Nice to see that the reviewer doesn’t shy away from the w- word, but nowhere does he use the l- word, instead referring to “queer women”**. Kind of ironic in a review of a book named after the original Lesbian.
*A pet peeve as a longtime subscriber and lifelong fan of print newspapers: I hate reading an article in the paper only to find that it was published days earlier online. Yes, I’m a dinosaur.
**I have no clue if the author uses “lesbian”.
[…] Via What a Maroon I read a review by Jacob Brogan of a novel about lesbians which (as WaM noted) doesn’t use the word “lesbian” once. The word “queer” on the other hand appears nine times. I get that the word “queer” has been, according to some people, reclaimed or repurposed or seized or whatever you want to call it. There’s a parallel, I think, to the way the word “Negro” went out of favor to be replaced by its English language equivalent, “Black.” It was a move from the weirdly euphemistic to the blunt, because what the hell was there to be euphemistic about anyway? “Negro” came to seem tellingly squeamish. There’s also of course a parallel to the reclaiming (or claiming) of “dyke,” helped along by Alison Bechdel. […]
It’s hard, I realise, to discern the actual message of radical feminism when the loudest voices are those opposed to it; this is almost certainly why this young woman (who seems to hold views uncannily close to the ones I held at her age) has spent such a lot of effort on objections to the strawman version. There are a few phrases which suggest that somewhere in the back of her mind something is prodding her to consider the possibility that she’s attacking a strawman, but her certainty keeps re-asserting itself. She’ll learn that there’s a reason that it is “crabby, disagreeable old radical feminists who have stuck to their guns” on the transgender issue; when you realise that you’ve been kept away from supporting radical feminism by a curtain of stereotypes and lies, and that it’s a movement based on class analysis and not the hatred of individuals because of who they are (as you have been misinformed your whole life), it’s logical to become crabby and disagreeable.
https://jennyeholland.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-ordinary-men
I’ve just finished watching an Oxford Union debate on the issue of ‘no platforming’. Eight videos.
Watch the full debate here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm9qFjqJ7as&list=PLOAFgXcJkZ2zjXNz89oRBj_3O5RSYvqDV
It has really brought into relief the underlying assumptions we often make here at B&W; that we debate ideas on their merits, and not give weight either way to them according to who is expressing them. I have been opposed to many of the expressed beliefs of Anne Widdecombe and Katie Hopkins; and have, in the past, considered them to be not very nice women precisely because of their expressed beliefs – when I should, of course, have restricted myself to criticising those beliefs and not imputing any bad character as I know neither of them. Anne Widdecombe in particular is a hard woman to pin down, because I have found my rational brain agreeing with her at times when my instincts are insisting that ‘she’s a horrible person, so why am I even listening to her’? Gut feelings are our most important instincts in so many situations, but not in rational debate.
Here both she and Katie Hopkins advance rational, reasonable, and well-supported arguments in favour of NOT ‘no-platforming’ anyone, while the oppositions points are either very naïve or completely at a tangent (Robert French’s speech seems to be supporting an entirely different motion, ‘Both sides agree’).
Kellie Jay is utterly right to say that just because we may disagree vehemently with someone else’s views on various political and social issues, that is no reason to shun them when they agree to support us on others. I doubt I agree on everything with anyone; no-one would have any friends if that were their standard for others to meet.
WaPo hit piece on the “Witch Trials” podcast. Attacks on women speaking are perfectly justified because the women didn’t include men who claim to be women.
Listening to ‘The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling’ is exhausting work
Sorry it’s a link to a tweet for all you non-users:
https://twitter.com/JamesEsses/status/1632813395211694081
There’s a documentary about Bill Cosby currently airing on the BBC. In it, a “non-binary sex therapist” says that the problem wasn’t that Cosby is a rapist, the problem is “sex negativity”. In a “sex positive” world, she says, Cosby could have paid women to be drugged into unconsciousness so he could rape them “consensually”.
I will say again that this was aired on the BBC.
Please consider complaining about this if you can.
This is your brain on queer theory. This is what queer theory deems not only acceptable, but ‘sex positive’.
Jeezus.
Here’s something good to read for a change, from a feminist I recall from back when I was in college in the 1970s.
How the Transgender Movement is Destroying Feminism – by Phyllis Chesler
It came out in April, 2021 and I’m glad to have come across it.
This recent essay by Chesler (not Chester, no thank you spelchuck) is also a great read about a subject we’re all too familiar with:
Choose an Identity then Perform it
We live in the age of identity politics and identity fraud. Identity is now all about one’s visible race, religion/ethnicity and gender, not about one’s work, ideas, or opinions.
I’m so glad that Phyllis Chesler is still going, and just as indefatigable as ever. One of the old guard.
This week’s Blocked and Reported features a segment on the Unicorn Ranch which seems to be the source of all those pics of TIMs with pink assault rifles if anyone’s interested (it’s a shit show).
This guy is a real piece of work >>
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/07/tech/elon-musk-twitter-employee-disability/index.html
@319 Oof. So much wrong there.
This was tweeted by the Indy using #IWD tags:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/international-womens-day-jordan-gray-trans-b2295599.html
“writes trans comedian Jordan Gray” – so, not funny then?
Well here’s a good find for IWD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHGqp8lz36c
Not my find, I got it from Maggie Nelson (who is also well worth listening to, for those on Twitter).
A poitician has been underfunding vital services to deflect the money into ‘LGBTQ+’ ‘projects’. This is infuriating, and by ‘LGBTQ+’ I think they mean ‘T’, and possibly ‘Q+’ in as far as those fall under the ‘T’:
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/roderic-ogorman-raids-funds-to-push-11m-to-lgbtq-projects-42370318.html
It’s a scandal, but it’s only stealing from people who already have no power and giving it to those who do, so nothing will happen.
Graham Linehan has more:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/the-money-was-just-resting-in-their
Follow up @325 >> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633253950198624257?s=46&t=j-OMF6zSPBDumTVpOwHWSw
“Sorry but it wasn’t my fault, GIGO.”
Moron.
@328 Identifies as funny.
#332
Reply to Elon: “Please tweet a screenshot of the lawyer letter that persuaded you to run for cover.” Nice.
I’m part way through watching this documentary, and I think it’s quite good. You can find the trailer and the full documentary linked here:
Affirmation Generation: The Lies of Transgender Medicine
Elephants are pretty damned smart:
Stopping trucks on the highway to get some sugar cane.
Hat tip: Bruce Schneier
I saw that the other day and watched it about six more times. I love it. I especially love the way the first elephant trumpets when the truck tries to sneak away without stopping. “STOP, let me grab my couple of sugar canes, THEN you can go.”
I saw that Michelle Yeoh is the first actress who “identifies as” Asian to win the Oscar for best actress. Seeing the phrase reminded me about a few years back, when I first became aware of the concept of “identify as” but before the trans juggernaut was in full force. I was debating internally how I might “identify”. One of the rules I think I unconsciously applied was that one could only “identify as” some ethnic category if one actually had some factual basis for that identity. For example, Tiger Woods, who is of Thai, Chinese, Black, White, and Native American background, could legitimately “identify as” any or any combination of those things, it was a matter of personal choice of emphasis, not of fabrication. Now, of course, “identify as” has become more important than mundane facts about people, and sometimes (often) facts don’t matter at all. So is it more important that Yeoh embraces her Asian ancestry, or that she is, as simple point of fact, actually of Asian ancestry?
This story came across my news feed yesterday. After a quick recap of the “anti-trans rights” litany (banning hormones and surgeries for kids! restricting drag shows!), we get into the main story, about a TiM being “verbally assaulted” while livestreaming his lunch with his dog at a Cheesecake Factory. To be clear, no one should be verbally assaulted by a stranger while eating lunch with their dog, not even at a Cheesecake Factory, but still, the story raises some questions.
First, the news story doesn’t show the whole interaction; for that, you’d need to go to TikTok (and I don’t go there). But apparently the “verbal assault” consisted of making jokes, calling him “son” (misgendering, doncha know), asking if he’d like to see the scars on her stomach, and saying she “hits hard”. Sounds pretty annoying. She also identifies herself as a “TERF”. So our hero called over the manager (no Karen he) and got an apology.
But it’s all very odd. First, why is he livestreaming at a Cheesecake Factory? Is that normal? And what’s that business about her scars? Why would she want to show it? When she talks about “hitting hard”, does she mean physically or verbally (as in “hard-hitting journalism”)? And who identifies herself as a TERF?
More broadly, would KPIX show video of gender-critical feminists getting attacked, and characterize it as anti-GC hate?
And most disturbing of all, the Cheesecake Factory allows dogs to sit on their seats?
Anyway, you’ll be glad to know that “Lily” stayed amazingly calm and polite throughout the whole ordeal (almost as if she was expecting it), and, most importantly, she’s gained thousands of followers.
Sackbut@338,
Tiger Woods used to call himself “Cablasian” (a portmanteau of all his different ethnicities).
Karen Attiah had a column about what she calls “the racial imposter problem”, and she makes some interesting points. For example:
In light of that, I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn that Karen Attiah toes the trans-ideology line.
WaM @ 340
That was an interesting column. I disagree with a lot of it, but the arguments were illuminating.
I think where my thoughts were, in reference to “things to be tried on and discarded”, is that my unconscious rule was that things could be discarded but not tried on. That is, I can envision people saying, “Yeah, I’m part Bolivian, but I don’t identify as Bolivian”, and having that kind of sentiment found acceptable. And if a movie is seeking Bolivian representation, they can’t just hire someone who actually is of Bolivian background, it must be someone who (additionally) claims Bolivian as part of his or her identity.
If how someone identifies becomes so much more important than the facts of their ancestry, it doesn’t seem too huge a step to say that the facts of their ancestry are actually irrelevant. But that doesn’t happen; one can only identify as some subset of one’s actual ancestry. Why reality matters in this “identify as” form but not in trans ideology remains unclear.
Sackbut,
Yeah, it’s a complicated situation–ethnicity is some mix of ancestry and geography (“Asian” only makes sense as an identity outside of Asia), and some mix of external criteria and internal feeling. And some identities may be easier to take on than others. Alberto Fujimori could legitimately claim to be Peruvian, but my wife’s cousin who was born and grew up in Vienna to Spanish parents can’t get Austrian nationality.
One would certainly think that sex is more clear cut–it’s a category with two values, and with vanishingly few exceptions everyone is one or the other. But perhaps it comes down to ancestry–after all, we’re all equally descended from males and females, so perhaps we do get to choose..
Video by The Famous Artist Birdy Rose about threats against Shumirun Nessa over her criticism of groomer Jeffrey Marsh. Great video. I’m pretty furious about the situation.
https://youtu.be/-C-VQLomqH4
This should be easy, right? A sport which depends entirely on strength should be strictly segregated by sex. Or perhaps you could accommodate trans people by creating a third category for people calling themselves trans and “non-binary”, as USA Powerlifting tried to do. Seems like a reasonable compromise.
But of course a TIM disagrees, and he found a judge to agree with him. The judge’s opinion is, well, something.
If that’s the case, why have separate women’s sports at all? Shouldn’t everyone just compete in one league? I mean, we don’t allow segregated schools anymore.
Most of the rest of the judge’s opinion is the same old boring arguments (inclusion, fairness, etc.), but at least the article itself is fairly well-balanced in presenting the other side of the issue.
And while I don’t condone corporal punishment, and never practiced it on my kids, I got a chuckle out of this (Larry Maile is the president of US Powerlifting; JayCee Cooper is the trans-identified male who sued) (my bolding):
The organization fights on.
God that’s infuriating.
[…] a comment by What a Maroon at Miscellany […]
A scary development >>
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/14/us/seaweed-blob-florida-mexico.html
I’m sure the pressure that humans put on the environment is a big factor.
https://www.thecut.com/2023/03/4b-movement-feminism-south-korea.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Interesting article about a strong feminist movement in South Korea–4B is an attempt to cut off all relationships with men. (The 4B moniker refers to four different elements of heterosexual relationships–marriage, childbirth, dating and sex.) Sadly, the article has the usual tarnish from the usual source:
But that’s the only sidetracking in a fairly long and thoughtful article. Definitely worth a read.
This “Jacobin” article by Fran Amery and Aurelien Mondon is an utter, utter, disgrace (using *Mermaids* and *GenderGP* as sources?)
https://archive.is/VYL7b
In a sleight of hand, it is not transphobia that threatens the rights of the trans community, but those who oppose transphobia who are threatening women (understood as a monolithic group, in which only the experiences and expectations of middle-class white women matter).
What planet are these real-life Dave Spart types on? Have they never heard of Allison Bailey, Raquel Rosario Sánchez or Jana Cornel ?
This piece is getting very widely retweeted. Maybe us at B&W should take its logical fallacies and factual errors apart?
Attended the Let Women Speak event in Adelaide, and wouldn’t ya know it, the TRA opposition did not want to let women be heard. Attendance of our team was in the 50-70 range, though my view was bad as I was on low ground. The misogyny brigade had up to 100 people, virtually all under 25 and doing their best to silence women speaking for women’s rights. Because they’re on the right side of history, apparently.
But I managed to hear most of what was said, and was struck by the bravery of those that spoke in front of a baying mob. Such a striking difference to the two groups.
I think I saw a certain Reverend lurking in almost the exact opposite part of the crowd from me too!
I’ve had a moment just now, and realized that transgender health care is also fetish nourishment. I know, late to the party and all that, but there it is.
Still worth saying.
NPR (Terry Gross interview): Drag queen (and ordained minister) Bella DuBalle won’t be silenced by new Tenn. law
The article describes the new law accurately, I think:
What the interviewee says about the law:
Somehow I don’t see how he reads a ban on sexualized performances in public or in front of children and manages to interpret that as saying all drag performances are sexualized. I mean, I’ve heard some drag performers say that’s the case most of the time, but the law certainly doesn’t imply that. I linked to the signed bill above, it’s pretty short.
The only criticism I have for the law is that it only limits ‘adult cabaret performances’ if the people involved are in drag. If the bill author and sponsors want to eliminate sexualised performances from public, why include that limitation? This makes it clear that it is a shot at drag more so than anything else.
KJK in Adelaide. When the camera pans around, sometimes I am visible! Fame!!
The text of the law does not refer to drag:
Drag is implied under “male or female impersonators”, certainly, but that’s only one of the categories. I suppose there are other manners of prurient entertainment not specified, but I think their definition is pretty comprehensive and not limited to drag.
Given the whole point of starting the drag queen story hour campaign was to normalize drag as an overtly sexual performance, I don’t have much sympathy for drag performers here. If they still want to do drag and read to kids, they can do it dressed like, you know, a normal person instead of doing outrageous womanface with fake tits and revealing tights. I once wrote a city ordinance that regulated adult entertainment businesses and the Tennessee law is basically doing that and isn’t discriminating against drag in particular.
One more thing for Trump to weasel his way out of >> https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/17/politics/trump-gifts-democrats-report/index.html
@Freemage,
Presumably not in that order, though.
The point of laws like this TN one is to intimidate people and chill expression, and this very thread demonstrates how.
Oh, the law doesn’t specifically say that all drag performances are illegal, only ones that appeal to a prurient interest! And who could be against performances of a prurient interest where CHILDREN might see it? (Won’t somebody think of the children?)
Except what makes something an “appeal to a prurient interest”? Yes, it’s a phrase used in obscenity law, so it has some legal meaning, but obscenity has other requirements that limit its applicability, and even with those it’s still a bit of a dangerously fuzzy concept.
And here in this very thread we have J.A. expressing the view that drag performances are de facto appeals to prurient interest.
Imagine trying to advise a client on what they can and can’t do in TN. Can you perform a stage version of Mrs. Doubtfire? Well, the Robin Williams version didn’t seem terribly sexy, so probably? But maybe not. Maybe it depends on the size of the fake breasts. But hey, you probably wouldn’t be convicted. I mean, you might be arrested and lose your job and not be able to pay rent or mortgage while you await your trial, and end up owing huge amounts of attorneys fees, but you’ll probably be acquitted, right? Sound like a risk you’d like to run?
It’s the same with some of the laws being passed in Florida. Oh, gosh, the law doesn’t say you can’t have books about Rosa Parks in schools! I mean, a teacher wouldn’t be convicted for having such a book in their classroom library. Well, almost certainly not. They probably wouldn’t even be charged. I mean, what are the chances of some conservative parent making a stink, and some crusading and/or politically ambitious D.A. deciding to press charges? That would never happen in the great state of Florida! Well, ok, it might. But probably not! That sounds like something worth risking your career, financial security, and freedom for!
Holms @ 355 – and glory!!
[…] a comment by Screechy Monkey at Miscellany […]
Does anyone still have a copy of “Woman’s Body: An Owner’s Manual”?
I read it a bazillion years ago but I don’t remember if it was any good.
Screechy Monkey, here’s an example of what one would consider prurient with respect to a drag queen story hour:
https://twitter.com/Dominiquetaegon/status/1629157014684282880
It’s just not the same thing as a banning a book about Rosa Parks. As for showing films like Mrs Doubtfire and Tootsie, let’s just say that they’re not showing men aping sexy poses while pretending to be women reading stories to kids. You don’t have to trust me on this, but you might want to ask yourself why drag queen story hours came to be in the first place. Hint: cut bono?
Well, North Dakota, look at you!
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/republican-north-dakota-supreme-court-finds-right-to-abortion.html
While the hateful cowboys and coalmongerers in Wyoming are banning the distribution and administration of mifepristone, the North Dakota Supreme Court (all Republicans, btw) has determined that because the North Dakota law does not allow abortions to save the life of the mother, nor protect her health, it is unconstitutional on the grounds that it deprives women of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Moreover they noted that an 1887 law from territorial Dakota guarantees the right to an abortion establishing long precedence.
What a Maroon@359: Wierdly enough, I think it DOES mean them in that order. The idea is that each of the four “B”s is an aspect of heterosexual relationships that, in S. Korean culture, put women at risk, and thus, should be avoided. The order is a progression of having less and less involvement with men.
Deciding “I never want to get married” is thus first, as it’s arguably something that would invariably involve the other three. Then, “I never want to have a child” (an unwed woman could still give birth, albeit in a manner considered very shameful, though possibly not as shameful, weirdly, as childless spinsterhood). Not dating means not spending time with men outside the bedroom in any fashion, and then finally, ruling out even casual hook-ups with men completes the non-interaction (and thus, becoming either celibate or political lesbians, which was a term used in the article).
I’d certainly encourage a similar movement in any US state that passes laws against abortion, birth control and so on.
Freemage,
Ah, that makes sense. I was thinking of the order in which those events typically take place, not the order in which women swear off them.
That’s one of the clearest examples of patriarchy I’ve seen. Women are valued first as vessels for childbirth, second as property.
PZ has a post today laughing at young Earth creationists struggling to understand stem cell and genetics developments. Have at it, they deserve to be laughed at. But I found it interesting to see evidence, as usual, that PZ knows perfectly well what certain English words mean…
“Biologists have managed to reprogram stem cells taken from a male mouse into female oocytes, then fertilized them with sperm from another male mouse, and produced healthy offspring — that is, they’ve made mice with two fathers.”
‘Father’ used when referring to male parents.
“It’s only been done in mice, and it’s a long, long way to being repeatable in humans, but this is exactly the procedure two gay men could use to have children together.”
‘Men’ used when referring to male people.
The commenters, people who happily muddle sex with gender whenever the context involves trans people, also follow this trend.
“The DNA came from two male mice. Therefore, the mice have two daddies. So simple a child could understand it, but not a creationist.”
Nor a trans activist. This burst of rationality only occurred because they don’t have the trans activist hat on for the moment.
Must be because mice don’t have souls. No soul, no magic gender.
I’m beginning to think fruitful conversation is actually an extreme rarity. I was just butting my head against someone who apparently believes that this:
isn’t a contradiction, but instead means that p is constantly changing from true to false and back. Like the truth value is p is in some state of quantum indeterminacy. As though logical statements work like computer code in a while loop.
For real, though. How can we convince someone that a belief is wrong when they reject basic logic?
Grr. Missed a semicolon at the end of the second if statement, but whatever. Doesn’t matter for all languages anyway.
@NiV “How can we convince someone that a belief is wrong when they reject basic logic?”
Unreasonable people don’t appreciate the beauty of logic. Pearls before swine. Logical underpinnings are sufficient for belief, but not necessary.
I am glad that CFI, possibly alone among the major atheistic organizations in the US, appears not to be captured by gender woo. Richard Dawkins is still involved despite statements like his recent assertion that there are two sexes. News elsewhere incorrectly reported that Dawkins said there were two genders, but I liked this brief item in CFI’s “Morning Heresy” news roundup:
Well the thing is Dawkins isn’t so much still involved as still in the driver’s seat. Robyn Blumner is the President and CEO. Dawkins isn’t going anywhere.
I saw the Piers Morgan clip the other day. I disagree with Dawkins on some things but not that one!
The *I* running away from the Alphabet Soup.
The ACT government is preparing legislation to outlaw surgery on people with DSDs until they are able to consent. I found a few comments from Intersex people quite enlightening.
Well, looks like that puts them at odds with the *T* part of the Alphabet Soup who seem to be on a never-ending path of surgery and chemicals to forcibly change their bodies.
Equality Australia tweeted
Now, if they could just apply that same logic to unnecessary medical interventions for children.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/intersex-rights-against-medical-intervention-promised-in-australian-first-laws/r7d76eofo
Somewhat interesting: Triggernometry interview Mary Harrington.
This sounds….big.
Washington, D.C.: Trans Day of Vengeance, March 31-April 1. Stop Trans Genocide
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2023/02/09/washington-d-c-trans-day-of-vengeance-march-31-april-1/
It’s a big protest organised by the Trans Radical Activist Network.
Somehow, I don’t think calling your protest “Day of Vengeance” will get the fair-minded general public on your side.
Sorry for the Post Millennial link, but it seems to be the only website covering this “Trans Day of Vengeance” in detail:
https://archive.is/tPd2e
Apparently there’s a trans-related court case in DC on the same day.
This whole protest looks absurd and incredibly dangerous.
It’s about “Vengeance”?
Antifa will be there too?
You can bet the Trump/Proud Boy nutters will turn up spoiling for a fight.
This whole event looks like a recipe for disaster. People are going to get injured…or worse.
Andy Lewis refutes Steve Novella’s gender woo–part 2:
https://www.quackometer.net/blog/2023/03/the-muddling-of-the-american-mind-part-ii.html